Aggiornamento del 3 ottobre 2015: meno pubblicizzato rispetto agli altri titoli indiani in cartellone, Parched sta gradualmente guadagnando terreno. Vi propongo:
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Video FilmiCafé: intervista concessa da Leena Yadav;
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Video FilmiCafé: Radhika Apte, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Surveen Chawla e Leena Yadav incontrano il pubblico in sala;
'Parched (...) is a film about women. The film is also one of the most honest, uncompromising portrayals of female friendship I've ever seen on screen. Set against the backdrop of a rural Indian village, the story centers on the life of Rani (Tannishtha Chatterjee), a 32-year-old widow who has a testy, entitled young son; (...) Bijli (Surveen Chawla), a local showgirl and prostitute who has been longtime friends with Rani; and Lajjo (Radhika Apte) a young woman in an abusive relationship - her belligerent husband is the villainous village charmer, Manoj (Mahesh Balraj).
Meeting me in a hotel in Toronto two days after her film's premiere, Yadav says these characters were inspired by women she met while traveling through Indian villages for research and inspiration. According to her, their stories of pain and joy - but also, surprisingly, their earnestness about sexuality - moved her. She had the kernel of an idea, but wasn't sure how the story should unfold, so she looked to other people and their stories, too.
During one conversation, she said, the actress Tannishtha Chatterjee shared a story about filming in a remote village. Yadav suddenly struck gold. She says, "The women of the village kept asking her how she would survive, sexually, without a man." So Yadav started conceptualizing a narrative. "For them, sex was such a basic thing. They were very curious about how a person lasts without sex for forty days. How would [Chatterjee] manage on the shoot? Did she have an arrangement with members of the crew?" Yadav laughs. "That's how I decided to write about sex in the village."
Realizing there was a way she could harness, elucidate, and demonstrate the beautiful synergy that exists when women talk to other women - and the emotional honesty of conversations rupturing lines of class and circumstance - she devised a challenging, profound film treatment. We often see men onscreen discussing women, but very rarely the inverse. In discussing men, Rani, Bijli, and Lajjo don't hold anything back. "[Even] in the most conservative households women get together in the kitchen and they discuss the guy who could get it up, and the guy who couldn't get it up," Yadav says.
Despite the obvious cultural markers of Indian society, you can place Parched, culturally, anywhere. Yadav has a unique ability to evoke the very deep sensibilities of womanhood and female sexuality: The trapped secrets of infidelity or desire, and abuse; the realities we rarely are allowed to share. Of all the people Yadav based characters on, she says the woman who inspired Rani was particularly compelling to her: "She cooked all day for us. We talked and laughed. She was needling and then, at one point, she turned to me and said, 'I haven't been touched in 17 years. Do you know what that means?'" Moved and inspired, Yadav felt that her specific story had to be shared with an international audience. "That's something I really wanted to explore: The necessity of touch. I wanted to capture that energy, that soul in the film."
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| Tannishtha Chatterjee e Radhika Apte in Parched |
Yadav says she struggled, at first, with telling these stories: How could she weave in a tale about the lightheartedness of these women but also their sadness? She felt it was important for her to balance both their strength and their day-to-day struggles with internalized misogyny, while also juxtaposing it with the genuine happiness they found in their friendships, or the small pleasures of their lives. Parched is not a story of anguish. It's a story of resilience in light of pain. "I did post-production in LA and I would be in the cutting room all day," Yadav says. "After a couple of days I felt like I was going mad. Not being near people, not touching people - it was suffocating. I stopped eating food because I couldn't eat it with my hands. So I wanted to really explore that a lot with Rani and Lajjo: The meaning of touch for the both of them." What would touch mean to two women who had never been loved by the men they were with?
At one point in the film, after Manoj beats up Lajjo - again - Rani comes to her aid. Lajjo has collapsed and is incapable of moving, so Rani nurses her wounds, slowly removing her top to get to the bruises, exposing Lajjo's breasts. It's subtle, a shot filmed with fragility and tenderness. As Rani begins to caress Lajjo's breasts, the experience looks more familiar than sexual, erotic only due to its earnestness. It's a loaded and nuanced moment. "It's a scene that makes a lot of people uncomfortable because they call it a lesbian scene, but in fact it's a mother-daughter scene, or a friends scene - it takes on every role between two women," Yadav explains. (...)
As Yadav reminded the audience in a panel after the screening of Parched, "India is the land of [the] Kama Sutra." Conversations about sex, however, seem to be confined to the kitchen, or enclaves of women, and not as much on the pop-cultural forefront. This is why films like Parched matter, why Yadav's frankness about sex is simply revolutionary for all women. It's about demanding more for both women and men. (...)
In many ways, Parched tells a universal story; it reflects the stories of all women because women around the world have a lot in common. "When I shared this script with friends around the world, they would send me their stories," Yadav says, her eyes big, warm, and watery. "Nobody interacted with it like a script, so that's why I made the characters symbolic of something more, symbolic of issues that I wanted to highlight."
What's so profound about Parched - beyond the superb storytelling and its universality - is its critique of the patriarchy, which, obviously, is also universal: Although the women in this film grapple with systemic misogyny, Yadav emphasizes how that happens outside India. "With this movie in particular I get, 'I didn't know things were so bad in India!' a lot, and I think to myself, Are you kidding me?" she says. "People forget it happens on every level. If an audience isn't perceptive, they sit on their high horse and judge - like, 'Oh poor things, is this what happens?' If they are really receptive they'll understand it's happening in their backyard." (...)
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| Tannishtha Chatterjee in Parched |
"I've seen violence. Violence with my friends, violence on the streets, but nobody talks," Yadav says. "A woman friend of mine made a really beautiful observation. She said, 'Leena, Parched made me realize how many levels we are covering up. We are covering up with laughter, with makeup. We are just covering up all the time.'" Yadav reiterates that women need to help other women: "What's so scary about the patriarchy is that the strongest believers, the people who have bought into the most, are women."
She explores this idea in the film as well. When Rani's son Gulab finally does marry (...) Janaki (...), slowly we see [Rani] morph into an abuser, she crusades against [Janaki], vilifying her new daughter-in-law endlessly. Yadav's message is clear: If you believe in your own rights as a woman, you should also believe in the rights of other women. Protect them, foster them, be good to them.
"When you're a daughter-in-law you think your mother-in-law is shit, but when you become a mother-in-law you do the same thing," Yadav says. "It's the same cycle. You justify it in your head: It's okay! I went through it, so she can go through it. Or you start thinking, She needs to understand her place in the house." Towards the end of the film, Rani's redemption with Janaki is meager, but ultimately powerful. Yadav avoids quaintness, and makes sure that we see how effectual - and liberating - small acts of kindness can truly be. (...)
I couldn't say to [Leena Yadav] how, as a woman, as a South Asian woman, and as a woman invested in the lives of the many other women who are abused and harassed for their gender, this film is not just necessary. It is life-affirming. At our interview, Yadav reticently describes how her position as an artist is always undermined by her sex first, her race second. "In this industry people want to constantly remind me, and call me, a woman director, but I'm a director," she says. "Nobody would ever call a male director a male director".'
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