The world has moved forward. Humans have reached space, are making innovations in science, working on extraordinary projects, and are also these days using artificial intelligence (AI) to ease life. But do Indian women, not the privileged ones, the large majority, from poor to middle class, fall in the category of humans? This question has been raised several times in the past given different circumstances or contexts, but has anyone ever thought about it deeply driving toward the answer? Probably not, and this is the only reason why yet again the same question has been raised by a recently released movie named ‘Mrs.’ starring actress Sanya Malhotra.
The movie which was released on the 7th of February on the Zee5 OTT platform is a remake of the original Malayalam movie named ‘The Great Indian Kitchen’ starring actress Nimisha Sajayan and actor, and comedian Suraj Venjaramoodu. It unapologetically takes the viewers through the life of Indian women who are promised a happy married life, without the faintest idea that they are not marrying a man, but being married off to his family’s kitchen.
The movie stars Sanya Malhotra as Richa, the new bride wife to Dr Diwakar (played by actor Nishant Dhaiya). It makes the viewers pity Sanya’s character and hate Dahiya to the core, forgetting that he is just playing a character on screen, a character so normalised in millions of households that it takes time to realise the scary reality behind it. Notably, Mrs, which has marked one of the biggest openings on the Zee5 platform, has also aced the career growth graph of Dahiya, who was earlier seen in Bollywood movies like Kedarnath, 83, Meri Pyaari Bindu, and more.
Triggers between innocent and courageous dance sequences
‘Mrs.’ begins and ends with a few dance sequences of Sanya as Richa who has a great passion for her art and wishes to make a career out of it. However, a huge expressional difference can be noted in both sequences given Richa’s loss of starry-eyed innocence. From a young girl full of dreams, she has matured into a strong, confident woman, a solid ‘prime number’, as her character puts it in the movie.
As the 111-minute-long reel begins, Richa is introduced to the viewers as a trained dancer, dancing out with her troupe in the open on the streets, when her parents prepare her to get married to Diwakar, a well-to-do gynaecologist. The families get the two married and the routines begin.
Diwakar goes to the clinic every day, attends patients, returns home, has food, and goes to bed, always making sure he has performed the chore of sex with the sole intention of getting his wife pregnant as soon as possible, without even pausing to observe if the wife wants it or not. He just assumes that since she is the wife, being the object of sex is her duty, no questions asked, no objections made. A duty just like the kitchen chores, sorting his wardrobe and placing his fresh pressed clothes ready on the bed for him to wear the next morning.
His father, Ashwin Kumar, played by renowned actor Kanwaljit Singh sits back at home, demands various types of typical Indian dishes from his wife, and tends to relax in his life after spending years in the medical field. The patriarch father-in-law has some questionable beliefs, and habits, and he expects the women of the household to meet his expectations, to the extent that he doesn’t even bend down to get his own shoes. His wife does that for him, perfectly synchronising her activities to meet the timing of his need for shoes with rocket science precision.
Meanwhile, the newlywed confused bride Richa observes the comforts and luxuries adopted by the father-son duo in the name of living normal lives. She chooses to stay silent throughout and struggles to be a ‘good’ daughter-in-law even when being humiliated by her father-in-law and husband for not knowing how to make chutney or cook meat the traditional way. She is criticized for making use of a food processor while cooking, unintentionally delaying lunch timings, demanding a maid for basic cleaning purposes, and so on. The male duo in the house doesn’t stop there as she puts up her wish to resume her career in dancing.
“Do these things even pay? What is the need to go out and work for money? Careers like dance troupes or arts don’t suit the texture or the image of the family,” Richa is told by her husband and his father as she repeatedly, yet politely seeks permission to resume dance rehearsals with her troupe. She is even sent on a major guilt trip for having her me-time once, while in the kitchen.
As the movie directed by Arati Kadav progresses, Richa is shown keeping dance aside and making immense efforts to make her father-in-law and her husband ‘happy’. She tries to make chutney on the grinding stone, just the way her father-in-law likes, cooks meat in a kadhai and not a pressure cooker, again, just the way her father-in-law likes, and makes useless efforts to prepare shikanji (a lemonade-like drink), just the way her brother-in-law likes, but is never, never appreciated. Instead, she is humiliated by gestures, not by words, and asked to focus on learning cooking skills from her boss’ mother-in-law and forget completely about dancing.
Through scenes of endless chores to meet careless demands, the viewer realises how pointless they are, and more importantly, how ‘normal’ they are in Indian household. The ‘normal’ demand of ‘hot phulka’ fresh from the chulha has a woman running to and fro and her efforts at making rotis going to waste. The chutney has to be manually grinded on stone because the father-in-law believes it tastes better that way. The random demands for ‘shikanji’ from guests and family that exhausts the woman who is already exhausted by the time she serves breakfast.
Through each stroke of the grinding stone, each rolling of roti, each serving of chai or shikanji, we witness Richa’s character dying a little inside. The lights in her starry-eyed face dimmed a little, and her smile became less and less human. The chores are more than symbolic; they are a graph, progressing to show how the woman gets lost in the kitchen in the cacophony of daily drudgery.
It’s just this. The movie just shows Diwakar and his father eating traditional Indian homemade cuisine and of course, the duo criticizing newlywed Richa for having desires, opinions, and dreams. What does patriarchy look like if not this? There are many minor incidents shown in the movie which are actually not new to any Indian household, yet the creation manages to trigger the viewers and question their lives.
Powerful dialogues
The movie has very basic, yet powerful dialogues indicating the actual messages to be seen by the viewers through their own sights. For instance, Richa in one of the scenes is shown struggling with repairing the kitchen sink drainage pipe. She tries but fails, so seeks help from her husband to get it fixed. But, rightly guessed- she simply gets ignored. Richa then decides to place a bucket under the drainage pipe to collect the dirty leaking water. The 1-2 second water leakage scenes frequently shown in the movie signify Richa’s patience level, only for viewers to decide whether she places another bucket replacing the first full or bursts to take a stand for herself. At one point in this entire sequence, it gets so frustrating that given an option viewers might want to go and help poor Richa fix the drain leakage themselves.
In another similar instance, a dialogue by Diwakar reading, “Pehla phulka aksar jal jata hai (first phulka usually burn)” triggers another level of anxiety and sadness as the audiences learn that he actually is not talking about phulkas but women, indicating that ‘women are easily replaceable’, and the second one is usually better.
Apart from this, some direct confrontations between Richa and Diwakar also enrage the audiences as Richa being a woman is dominated, humiliated, and forced to apologize for speaking the truth. A usual fakeness in the husband-wife relationship is also well portrayed by the director when Richa and Diwakar are invited over for dinner once by her friends. Richa, a little high on red wine here, speaks the truth saying that Diwakar had just obtained a ‘free maid and cook’ by getting married, which hurts his male ego. He pauses while pretending to help her clean the table post-dinner and cross-questions, “Do I never help you? Do I treat you like a maid? Is this how you’ll insult me in front of your friends? I am a reputed doctor damn it.”
He fails to realize that he actually never helps her, he treats her exactly like a maid. He mechanically became a part of a system where women are bound by the kitchen and are expected to make male lives better without even expecting love, affection, and appreciation in any form in return. On expecting any of these in such a system, women are easily labeled as ‘characterless’, and made feel inferior. Such thoughts appear when Diwakar judges Richa as she talks about her sensual desires and demands foreplay. He makes her feel like crap when he says that she smells dirty due to her kitchen work, contradicting his own ‘appreciation’ for her in the first 15 minutes when he says, “The smell of the kitchen is the sexiest smell in the world.” He even conveniently forgets that it is he who makes her stay in the kitchen all day.
Does the movie talk about feminism in any way?
The movie takes the women viewers through a roller coaster ride of emotions as every scene is well-thought-directed to make it highly relatable to them. The picture just shows women cooking in the kitchen, facing humiliation, and staying silent to maintain so-called peace within the family. Very few women like Richa get the privilege in India of standing by themselves and working to fulfill their dreams. Many might say that the scenario today has changed and that women are offered ‘equal opportunities’, are supported by families in their careers, and are also helped with house chores. But, one has to be a woman to actually analyze if this is even close to the truth.
There’s no denying that situations ‘might have’ changed in big cities like Mumbai, Banglore, Pune, Kolkata, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, etc where women can ‘freely work without worrying’ about their respective homes, and husbands, but there are hardly any changes seen in the remote localities which still hold on to the Indian patriarchy in the name of ‘Indian culture and traditions’. Women in remote areas are several ‘Richas’ who are forced to put behind their dreams, ambitions, and goals and look after the home chores, kids, and husbands. And there’s no denying it here too.
The women in such localities who chose to run behind their careers are then labeled ‘over-ambitious’, their characters are judged, and then such acts are even justified which hurts more. Movies like these- Mrs, the Great Indian Kitchen, the 2021 Marathi film ‘Jhimma’, the 2023 Marathi film ‘Baipan Bhaari Deva’ starring 7 renowned actresses including Rohini Hattangadi, etc are wrongly celebrated as ‘movies promoting feminism’. These are anything but the ones questioning the patriarchial system, portraying the truth, and eventually triggering the so-called male egos, forcing the entire male community to just look into their approach towards women.
In Mrs, it is not men vs women, it is a woman slowly realising how everyone and everything around her is a cog in the same machine. Richa gets no support from her mother when she tried to to talk to her. Richa’s mother-in-law is not the evil saas portrayed in serials, she is good-natured woman who displays no meanness towards her daughter-in-law, but patiently accommodates her in her world of kitchen, husband-serving and chores. She is a victim of the machine herself. But her light has dimmed and died long back. She no longer questions or objects, but does her chores with a robotic perfection. Richa doesn’t dislike her, she is terrified of becoming her because that is what everyone expects her to.
The system is harsh on men too
Such movies are actually not for women to watch, but for the male community to watch and learn the truth to at least accept it for now. Such movies are further the modes of communication speaking to the patriarchial society on behalf of many ‘Richas’ who fail to have the courage to stand up for themselves.
Again, it’s not like women can’t speak up for themselves or stand up for themselves, but they are forced to stay silent and tolerate or bear the heat of patriarchy, not only by the in-laws’ families but also by their own parents who knowingly or unknowingly imbibe their daughters with all the values and skills for her to become a ‘good daughter-in-law’ in future. Parents at least must also make enough efforts to make their sons become ‘better husbands’ and also humans if not ‘good son-in-laws’ for now.
The movie somehow also exaggerates some events showing just the negative side of the males. It’s not their mistake too, not all of it. It’s the system in which the entire society has grown up, isn’t it? It’s the system in which men expressing their feelings, crying out their emotions, and celebrating feminine energy have never had any ‘respect’. They’ve always been taught to uphold and show off their rigid side and allegedly cater to their male egos. However, in many cities today, patriarchy is ‘vanishing’ as men support their women in careers, help them with household chores, walk towards equity, and run away from rigidity. Whether a society should be like this or not is subjective and a topic of potential debate, but, a world of simple give and take, the question that rises is why can’t some of us just change? The husband of Richa’s friend is never threatened by his wife’s dance career, he makes tea and serves ice cream to guests without feeling discomfort. We see more and more men like him around us every day. It is not the burden of expectations, but a simple nod for mutual respect, and coexistence.
People today are using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to ease their lives but educated, egoistic doctors like Diwakar and his father don’t even want their women to use machines, or food processors to ease cooking and save time. How wonderful would it be if women could use AI for household chores and save time to flourish in their careers and fulfill their dreams? The last dance sequence by Richa in the movie shows her self-confidence though not innocence which probably vanishes away during her marriage with Diwakar. Free Richa in the end, also portrays the importance of courage to stand up for self as she says, “Now I’ll buy flowers for me to be happy.”
4/5 ratings: Monotonicity used as a primary weapon to pile up frustration
Mrs was actually premiered at the Tallinn Black Night Film Festival in the year 2023 and later was appreciated on several international platforms. It was also selected as the closing film at the 2024 New York Indian Film Festival where director Aarti Kadav was nominated for the Best Director category. The movie was further premiered at the 55th IFFI and also made it to the 14th Indian Film Festival of Melbourne (IFFM), 2024. Sanya Malhotra also bagged the ‘Best Actress’ award for her character as Richa at the 2024 New York Indian Film Festival. It was later directly released on the Zee5 OTT platform recently on 7th February, attracting the biggest opening ever on the OTT.
The movie deserves 4 of 5 ratings overall, one less for the monotonicity used as a primary weapon to pile up frustration. Sanya manages to gather all the sympathy’ while Nishant Dahiya excels at evoking hatred, reflecting his subtle yet powerful acting skills. It won’t be an over-exaggeration to say that Dahiya now has emerged as a key actor, awaiting all the love and appreciation from the entire movie fraternity, just like Vicky Kaushal did after ‘Raazi’.
