[Might contain spoilers, many of them.]
Ivan Ayr’s “Soni” opens with an alarming sequence. We hear catcalls over black and the rustling of a bicycle, and it continues for nearly a minute. A woman races her bike on lonely road on a wintry night in New Delhi and a man chases her on his. He jeers, harasses; she ignores him in a practiced sort of way. Her body language and vacant face suggest that she is well accustomed to this sort of behavior. He continues gaily. Suddenly, she slows down, gets off her bike, and walks it through a dark alley. He follows her. A heated volley of words takes place, and the encounter culminates with her lashing out at him. She is finally pulled off him by her associates. He gets a broken jaw and swollen eye.
In any other Hindi film, this would have been a moment to rejoice. In “Soni,” it becomes a premonition. The general feeling is that she, a police officer, shouldn’t have reacted the way she did. Her superior, Kalpana, chides her for it. What if he had a knife? What would she have done then? Why didn’t she follow protocol?
What if she hadn’t defended herself, we wonder. What then?
Soni, the eponymous protagonist of Ayr’s feature-film debut, is a police officer working in the graveyard shift. In New Delhi, her credentials don’t guarantee her safety; lecherous remarks are leveled at her, and her frequent encounters with men inevitably touch a nerve for men do not seem to value boundaries. It’s a film shaking with rage, but it doesn’t permit us the luxury of catharsis by transforming this rage into quick-fix solutions. Instead, it finds other ways to channel it: through silence mainly, by making its central character silently bear the brunt of being a woman in India who simply defended herself from a ghastlier fate.
It has been so long since a Hindi film has understood and rightly exploited the power of silence. In “Soni,” long silences reveal what words don’t: the loss of courage, the agony of being a victim of a patriarchal system that tries hard to drown a woman’s voice, and the dawning realization that things won’t change, at least not right away. Soni gets reprimanded for her aggression, which is seen as a poor quality in a female police officer, and when she reacts in a similar manner in a situation involving a drunk Navy officer, the system finds a way to get her off her job.
The incisive, knowing script, written by Ayr and Kislay, examines not just the gender divide within the New Delhi police force but also the power structure within it, both bound together by an indiscernible thread. Kalpana and Soni’s personal lives are not any better; Kalpana, the wife of a newly instated senior Crime Branch officer, is inscrutable at home. She manages a tired smile when asked questions about having a child, and is talked down upon by her husband when she broaches Soni’s subject. In a particularly impressive scene, she gets into a brief argument with her husband after Soni’s third scuffle. Her husband rebukes her for consoling her juniors, something he finds distasteful in a police officer. The job doesn’t encourage empathy. But Kalpana cannot help it; she hopes to mend what cannot be mended. The two have disparate working styles, two different ideas of how the world works and should work. His is prudent, shaped by years of working in a system he knows too well. Hers is idealistic, driven by a desire to do things right.
When these ideas exist under one roof, as they do here, it is an open invitation for a clash. But “Soni” shuns the temptation to mine drama from it; Kalpana submits to her husband’s lofty barbs by staying silent. When she wants to get Soni reinstated, she quietly requests him to speak with his seniors. At that moment, she is not the IPS officer with a team reporting to her; she is his wife. And he agrees grudgingly, more as a husband than a colleague. It’s the chameleonic quality of this relationship that lends the film part of its acuity.
Soni’s life is not too different. She has an estranged husband who still cares about her, but is kept away by her stubbornness to not forgive him for his past mistakes. She regularly skips meals, a recurring detail that discloses the extent of how much her job consumes her life, and the only person with whom she seems to speak with a hint of affection is her motherly neighbor. In one of the film’s most telling scenes, the neighbor suggests, with outmost seriousness, a way to curb harassment: by wearing the sacred sindoor, the mark of a married Indian woman. It is a wryly comic touch and a terrifying one at that. In another scene, Soni suggests that a girl, who is caught with her boyfriend by two policemen in an old deserted building in the dead of night, wear a shirt and cap to appear more like a man. It begs us to introspect, to ask ourselves why we have allowed male chauvinism to be so deeply embedded in our social fabric that these suggestions, foolish as they might sound, have become credible solutions for women to evade harassment.
The film’s most significant achievement is its thoughtful exploration of the bond between Soni and Kalpana. Although the difference between their respective perceptions of the city is indisputable, with Kalpana being ferried around in the safety of a police car and Soni left to get around on a bike, their experiences are similar to some extent. There is a clear class divide as well, but patriarchy transcends it; whether it is Kalpana’s increasing dependence on her husband to get Soni off, or it is Soni’s brawl against three inebriated men in the ladies’ washroom at a restaurant, women are quite, quite alone. Their men and their country have failed them. In a beautiful moment near the end, Kalpana gifts Soni a copy of ‘Revenue Stamp’ by Amrita Pritam. This comes right after Kalpana learns that her niece is being harassed by boys at her school, and her niece, fearing ostracism, is reluctant to report it. “Soni” reveals itself fully here: the two women quietly accept that all they have is each other and that is how it is going to be, thus changing the nature of their relationship inconspicuously and irreversibly.
Although we are only into the second month of the year, it wouldn’t come as a surprise to me if “Soni” ends up being among the best Hindi films to release this year. Ayr, aided by exceptional camerawork by David Bowen, top-notch sound design and two excellent central performances, gives it the tactful treatment it deserves. Its fade-out moment is melancholic, leaving us with a little hope but also the feeling that the future looks bleaker than we feared. At one point, Soni looks on, incredulous, as a man flirts with a female police officer on the phone in the Control Room, and the woman laughs it off, saying she gets four or five calls like this everyday. It is possibly the film’s scariest moment: the acceptance of the fact that men most likely won’t change, so it is up to the women to adapt to the new India. Do we still deserve to remain hopeful, then?
[Not For Reproduction]
