Praveen Lulekar
Last week, we discussed Happy Journey
where the sole purpose of the director was story-telling. There were no
statements or claims to be made. Candle March is a film that is made
with a completely opposite sensibility. It has a social issue at its core and
the story is constructed around it. The characters are representatives of an
aspect of the issue. It resembles a journalistic project like Investment did.
The ultimate objective is to underline harsh realities.
The good news is that Candle March succeeds
in making effective statements. Very few
films understand almost all aspects of a social problem. Fewer portray them
well. Although on a tad louder note, director Sachin Dev has raised a holistic
picture regarding sexual offences against women.
The story revolves around a gang rape
case. Sakhi (Sayali Sahastrabuddhe), a college-going girl, is raped by four men
and is also attacked with acid after that. The case connects three other women
– Anurata (Tejaswini Pandit), who admits Sakhi into the hospital; Shabana (Smita
Tambe), whose husband Saadiq (Nilesh Divekar) is one of the culprits and Vidya
(Manava Naik), a journalist covering the entire episode. The women are fighting
a battle of their own against different kinds of sexual exploitations.
To start with, the film has an extremely
tight screenplay (Sachin Darekar). Except a romantic song of Sakhi and her
boyfriend, the film moves very crisply. The challenge here was to inculcate
different aspects of the problem. The writer and director score very high on
the front. Anurata has a disturbing past of being a victim of a sex scandal;
Vidya is getting weaker in resisting the sexual advances of her boss and
Shabana fights the chauvinism of her husband and that of bar owner, who
promises to rescue Saadiq.
All this may sound like too much is
stuffed in a single package. The initial phase proves that true. But the
screenplay moves on to space things very well. Anurata’s past appears in
flashbacks, Vidya’s story becomes almost a parallel track and Shabana’s
realisation of Saadiq’s crime is the final nail in the coffin. The intensity
which Dev builds upon throughout reaches a high point when Shabana confronts
Saadiq; she asks him to ‘touch’ their 7-8 year-old daughter. The scene is
extremely well executed and literally gives you a shiver.
Dev overall displays a firm grip on the
narrative. He gives the film a loud tone but maintains it throughout. The
little tricks he uses in the scene transformation in the initial part are
really good. It is an interesting way to show how characters living different
lives are connected. And when they actually come face to face, the interactions
are riveting. When Shabana tells Anurata that it is difficult for a woman to
survive alone, even the latter’s pain is tapped. The women learn from each
other and more importantly, rise above such inhibitions.
On the acting front, all the three
ladies have done a good job. Credit to the casting for picking the right actors
for the right roles. Pandit is the real protagonist of the film. She conveys
the quiet, disturbed character with control. Naik also fares well as the
ambitious Vidya. Tambe is at her best with the loud-mouth yet suffocated slum-dweller.
A special mention for Divekar, who makes Saadiq really hate-worthy.
The end is a little prolonged but that
is because Dev wants to make a statement about the laws against sex crimes.
Anurata’s final speech also gets long in the process. But it does raise a
question unapologetically – does a rape victim have to die for the culprit to
be hanged?
M4m says: A Must Watch
.jpg)
0 comments:
Post a Comment