Movie: Mrs
Dir: Arati Kadav
On: Zee5
Cast: Sanya Malhotra, Kanwaljeet Singh, Nishant Dahiya
Rating: 4/5
Indigestion. Heartache. Restlessness. No, these aren’t the symptoms of an illness. This is what one is left feeling after watching director Arati Kadav’s gut-punching feminist drama, Mrs. Every second of this Sanya Malhotra-starrer features food that looks relishing but feels repulsive. It’s hard to recall the last time such gorgeous and intimate shots of different food items were on screen, yet there was nothing appetizing about them. Because, when was the last time a Hindi filmmaker turned the spotlight on the dehumanising labour that goes into making that finger-licking ‘home-cooked’ food? Of course, this was done in The Great Indian Kitchen, director-writer Jeo Baby’s 2021 Malayalam gem that also inspires Mrs.
But in Hindi cinema, Mrs stands tall, and is perhaps alone in showing the ugliness of a neat, clean, and educated Indian household, where the gynaecologist-husband doesn’t let his wife enter the kitchen during her periods, the mother-in-law, an economics graduate, sacrifices her chance at a career to make her son a doctor, and the father-in-law knows every recipe but never enters the kitchen.
So, of course, when an effervescent Richa, a dance teacher, enters the family, she has to let go of every dream and desire with each round of dishwashing, cooking, dusting, and cleaning. And while she is at it, she must also smell good and look desirable enough for her husband to want to make love to her and not merely treat her as a means to make a family. Kadav’s sensitive and soft treatment of the hardness that Richa is subjected to daily is aided by the adapted screenplay by Anu Singh Choudhary and Harman Baweja, also the film’s co-producer. Choudhary, who has also penned the dialogues, employs gentleness even while dropping uncomfortable truths. The fact that invisibilisation of women also depends on their caste and class is made evident on multiple occasions, including in a scene where a domestic help shares that her circumstances keep her from taking a break from work during her periods, and that no one is bothered to inquire about her well-being when she is in pain. Another bit about Richa teaching a house-help’s daughter about the power of prime numbers that gets a powerful call back towards the film’s end breaks one’s heart as well as heals it.
Every scene of Mrs is a story that almost every woman of every generation in a North Indian household has lived but rarely told. It’s to the credit of Choudhary and Kadav that they never villainise Richa’s mother or mother-in-law. The characters have, after all, perpetuated what they have learned, or were forced to do, by generations before them. The conditioning is so pervasive that even with all the progressiveness held close to the heart, one expects the same subservience from their mother that they stand against. It’s visible in a scene where Richa’s mother-in-law visits her daughter at the time of her pregnancy, and takes to the kitchen exactly how she did back at home.
One of the highlights of Mrs is the manner in which Choudhary shows that almost every man of the Kumar family knows how to cook. They have recipes memorised, but only to recite to an ‘amateur’ cook, Richa; not to prepare a meal themselves. And, God forbid they do prepare a meal, they will leave a messy trail that must be cleaned by the women of the house. The suffocation felt by Richa is brilliantly portrayed by Malhotra in her career-best turn. The actor excels at showing how the spirit of a hopeful bride dims and dulls with each passing day in what can be described as a cage. She is supported by equally effective performances by actors Kanwaljeet Singh and Nishant Dahiya, who trigger rage with every expression.
Mrs is a mirror that reflects a distorted, dystopian portrait of what it is to be a woman. But it is also a mirror which, if looked deep into, can help clean the patriarchal stains.
