Tag: #film

Can you swallow the great Indian kitchen?

Swallow and The Great Indian Kitchen

It’s no secret that we live in a patriarchal world. We are at the dawn of new cultural reform, we are now truly understanding individual choices and freedom after years of shout-outs and books. But, any progress is progress. And to mark this progress, I bring out two cinematic parallels, Swallow (2020) and The great Indian kitchen (2021).

On the surface level, they might appear as two different films. But the thing that I clubbed them together is because in-depth they are the same movie! No, I’m not accusing of plagiarism, but I’m just pointing out the similarities in the theme. And this thematic similarities doesn’t occur from copying each other, but they exist around the world. 

The common theme in both the films is the identity crisis of a woman who is deemed to be a housewife for the rest of her life. And this happens everywhere in the world. The term housewife is synonymous to housemaid, the only difference is the wife is unpaid and should provide more services than a maid.

The theme

It is no exaggeration when I say women feel choked when this happens. Why would they as individuals should let another individual overshadow their identity? Now, the husbands don’t do that voluntarily in many cases, but it is indeed happening! In the name of culture and traditions we have long been shadowing a woman’s identity.

Both Swallow and The great Indian kitchen deal with this identity crisis of a housewife in their own different ways, deconstructing norms of their own regions. While Swallow is more focused on maternity, abortion, identity, freedom; The great Indian kitchen also touches religious and other cultural sentiments.

While Swallow is cleverly crafted and dealt with metaphors and surreal/psychological elements, TGK is straightforward and loud. TGK doesn’t hesitate from being passed away as over-spoken or being too predictable. TGK only cares about conveying the message and hence it is a mission accomplished. Right from the very first frame, the message and themes are clearly visible and understood in TGK.

The films as whole

While it is an artistic choice on how to make a film, it would have been better if TGK was not predictable. But at the same time, I’m hit with the dilemma that what if that is what they wanted to create? What if Jeo Baby, the maker, intended to bore me with predictability, because that is the entire point of the film. 

The film is nothing but an orthodox family and its housewife’s daily chores. Of course it’s predictable and repetitive. If this predictability was an artistic choice, it was a good thing to do so, because the message about the boredom and jail-ish feel of a housewife life is super conveyed!

But if it was a coincidence, then it was a lucky one. I wasn’t in awe looking at TGK as a film. But was in awe of the guts of the maker and the actor’s flawless acting. But if you ask if I would suggest TGK to others? Definitely I would! I urge all women and especially Indians to watch TGK!

Swallow keeps you hooked on with its interesting plot and character development. And it doesn’t feel like the plot is leading the character towards the shift. But it happens with TGK. Somewhere in the middle I felt like the character development was a bit shallow. It left a lot of doubts about the protagonist. The plot led the character shift in TGK, not how it should have happened. 

 We need more TGKs!

If only there were more details on the protagonist, it would have led the character development go smooth and doesn’t feel forced and projected. But Jeo Baby’s target was arranged marriage, regional cultural norms of marriage and post-married life of a housewife, so he might just have thought the details to be unnecessary. But the details would only have given a sense of completeness in the end.

India needs more movies like TGK. It is only through movies can we really make a cultural reform now. It’s time we understood why arranged marriages won’t work and only cause pain. It is already late to realise that housewives are nothing but housemaids with benefits.

Models become actresses and heirs become actors

We all talk about how nepotism is prevalent in the film and media. But there is also the other misconception around cinema, to bring models into the movies. Models are good looking, and they would look great in front of the camera, so Indian directors prefer models over people who can act. People think acting is simple, pretending a few facial expressions. But that is false. Bringing in models just because they are good looking is equally bad as bringing in actors because of their family heritage. An actor is someone who acts. And the term acting is the biggest oxymoron there ever is. To act is not to act but to live in the role. A person who is good at acting is a bad actor because acting is not about acting out but feeling the moment as it is real. It is a skill, and it is out of syllabus for modelling agencies. And it most possibly not a genome that passes through heritage!

Models and relatives of already existing actors usually think acting is all about pretending emotions. Few are an exception, but if you look at the majority of those actor turned models, they only know to pretend a bunch of expressions. And in every film they star, they are same, giving the same expressions in all the movies regardless of their role in the film. They are just bad actors because they are acting and not living in part. Living in character is not an additional skill for acting; it is what acting means. Because of sons, brothers, sisters and models entering acting without any prior training or proper knowledge about acting, ‘living in the role’ became a unique feature, and the one who has it gets treated like a special actor.

man standing on stage
Actors in a theater
Photo by Ruca Souza on Pexels.com

But it is the primary qualification for anyone to act in the first place. Now the films are crowded with such people who are not even qualified to play any character. If you watch behind the scenes of a foreign film, you will understand that if any actor failed to live the role, that scene gets added to bloopers and they are made into a memorable video calling ‘so and so actor broke character’. The fans made it even hell in India that, they demand the director to put specific songs and specific dialogues referring to their real-life presence. But if their real-life presence is referred to in a film, how are they even actors? Directors have even started writing stories that match the real-life character of the actors to satisfy their fans. This is why people who want to become actors go to modelling agencies instead of acting schools. How handsome does Joe Pesci look? Can you compare our so called ‘handsome’ actors’ method of acting with Pesci’s? You can’t!

This thoughtless process is how models and heirs have dragged the art called film to the dump. They even have started calling the movies as an ‘industry’. ‘Telugu film industry, Tamil film industry’. Since when did filmmaking become an industry? Why are Indian filmmakers cutting down the art in film and only concentrating on the commercial aspects of a movie? A film is an act of real-life incidents or imagined incidents. You can do a lot of things with a film. Primarily, you make a film to tell a story to convey an emotion. But making films to satisfy an actor’s fans and earn some dough, is cheating the profession. You are not a director just because you have directed a movie. You are a director if you know how to make a film. You do not know how to make a movie; you know the method to satisfy fans and earn money. You are a businessman, and yes, the word industry fits right for you. The things you are making are no films but just montages of fan service. Don’t call them movies and don’t call your ideas of promoting that shit as a vision.

celebration
Fans going gaga
Photo by Wendy Wei on Pexels.com

Let film be a film! Hiring models to do acting is like hiring a dental doctor to perform brain surgery!