Spoilers ahead…
And this month’s Juhi Chawla Award for Playing Against Type goes to… Satish Kaushik, the cuddly Calendar from Mr. India who plays Reddygaru in Lakshmi. We first see him as he alights from a car in the outskirts of Hyderabad. He’s clad in a white shirt, a white dhoti, and from his shoulder hangs a neatly pressed angavastram, which, of course, no human of the male persuasion south of the Vindhyas will be seen without, even while taking a shower. Reddygaru runs a cathouse, and he likes young girls. From a row of prospects brought in by Chinna (Nagesh Kukunoor, attired like a death-metal guitarist, with one fingernail painted a bright red), Reddygaru picks the 14-year-old Lakshmi (Monali Thakur), takes her home, makes her feel comfortable, and, when she least expects it, he rapes her. The scene is terrifying – it goes where rape scenes rarely go. We’re used to the male gaze, with the gradual stripping of the victim – the sari coming off, the blouse torn, the bra strap seen. But here, we see what Lakshmi sees when Reddygaru takes his clothes off. Kaushik is huge. He towers over the tiny Lakshmi like a monster from myth. He throws her on the bed, and literally engulfs her. He’s her “first,” and he obliterates her earlier existence.
The most affecting parts of Nagesh Kukunoor’s new film, based on a true story, are these vignettes of horror. Sometimes, these horrors are overt – as when Chinna wields a club, one end of which is pocked with nails. (It’s like a toothbrush designed by the Marquis de Sade.) Or when Lakshmi tries to escape from the whorehouse she’s sent to, only to be captured and brought back to the sight of everyone else wearing livid welts, being punished for her dreams of freedom.
But other times, these are silent horrors – as when Amma (Vibha Chibber) sees Lakshmi being taking away by Reddygaru and begins to boil water and sets out a bottle of Dettol. She knows she has to clean Lakshmi up when that door opens, and we wonder how long she has been doing this, and what brought her to this. Not a trace of emotion crosses her face when she tends to the broken Lakshmi, lying before her, legs splayed. She could be wiping dust from bookshelves.
How much of this is exploitative and how much is necessary to tell us what really goes on with little girls who are sold for tens of thousands and resign themselves to selling their bodies? Take the average Hollywood sex scene. It’s beautifully lit. There’s not a drop of sweat on the bodies. The saxophone masks the grunts, the sounds of flesh slapping against flesh. This is the idea of a sex scene, the carnal answer to elevator music. We know what’s supposed to be going on, but we don’t really get into it. Now take a Lars von Trier sex scene. It’s so graphic that we are forced to respond, both to what’s happening on screen as well as our own reactions, both physical and psychological. The latter is what Kukunoor is going for, with the jars of vaginal cream, the old men, the young men, the man who wears a wig, the repeated washing of Lakshmi’s barely mature sex organs, the pieces of padding slipped into her blouse, the bottle of booze that makes it all go away till the next customer violates her and leaves her cold sober. By immersing us into Lakshmi’s new life, Kukunoor gives us a guided tour of this particular hell. “Narak mein jaaoge,” Lakshmi spits at Jyoti (a moving Shefali Shah), the madam. Her reply: “We’re already there.”
After a point, Lakshmi gets used to it, and in her roommate Swarna (Flora Saini) we see what Lakshmi might be like in ten years. Swarna is so convinced she belongs here that when Lakshmi tries to run away – again – and is brought back, she asks her why she wants to escape. She seems genuinely surprised that someone would want to leave this life.
As long as we stay in the whorehouse, Lakshmi is a powerful social document. Is it cinematic? Sure. But it’s also eye-opening in the way non-fiction pieces are, detailing the hows and whats and whys of people we know little about, these victims of human trafficking. When Lakshmi makes a fuss about going into a room with a client, Jyoti whispers to her that the more she resists the more turned on he’s going to be, so why give him that pleasure? It’s like a parent playing mind games with a child who’s scared of stepping into the pool. Jyoti isn’t just the mother figure here, she’s actually a mother. In a matter-of-fact scene, set elsewhere, she sits with her daughter, a future engineer, and says, “Teri padhaai khatam, mera kaam khatam.” There are no tears. There’s only the ice cream in her hand.
After a solidly unsentimental first half – marred only by needless flashes to Lakshmi’s earlier life, in green-tinted frames – the film morphs into a stodgy courtroom drama. It’s as if Kukunoor lost interest after a while. It becomes very predictable. Lakshmi is rescued, and with the aid of a right-minded lawyer (Ram Kapoor) she decides to expose the villains who brought her to this racket. We’ve seen these theatrics before – the efforts to embarrass the plaintiff, intimidate her, bribe her, the last-minute witness, the shocking revelations. It may have been what actually happened, but it’s trite cinema. Monali Thakur gives a brave performance, but gradually she becomes less of an individual and more of one of those kinds of template-heroines whose stories we’re asked to bring handkerchieves for at the movies. The real-life Lakshmi deserved better.
KEY:
* angavastram = an expanse of cloth draped over the shoulder
* “Narak mein jaaoge” = you will go to hell
* “Teri padhaai khatam, mera kaam khatam” = I’ll stop working when you finish your studies
Copyright ©2014 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.
Baradwaj Rangan 
rothrocks
March 23, 2014
Satish Kaushik is actually a wonderful actor as I found out when I watched Brick Lane. Disappointed to hear the film lost its way in the second half. Not just your review, most reviews have been pretty mixed.
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hitheshds
March 23, 2014
I really liked the first half. It was a highly solid effort. The second half was very average. It was going through the motions, hardly doing justice to the things Lakshmi might have gone through in real life. The biggest problem for me was that Nagesh Kukunoor went overboard with how violent he wanted his men to be. He actually made me avert my eyes in two scenes.
The scene where Jyoti is attacked in the end by Chinna was something that I really didn’t feel the need for and there are a few scenes like that which didn’t really had much of a need except to establish the tyranny, which he already had in the solid first half.
I wrote a review : http://madaboutmoviez.com/2014/03/22/lakshmi2014-a-grim-and-emotionally-battering-tale/
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Aparna
March 25, 2014
“How much of this is exploitative and how much is necessary to tell us what really goes on with little girls who are sold for tens of thousands and resign themselves to selling their bodies?”
– That, to me, is the important question. It’s all very manipulative, no? ‘Feel sorry here, cry there, hate that guy, curse that one’… when shocked sufficiently, we simply do the filmmaker/ director’s bidding. (Of course, that is the whole purpose – to get a response from an audience, to set you thinking – and I suppose, at some level, when you see somebody else’s visualisation of a horror, it hurts more, because in our heads, when we read about the same horror, we can, if we please, always work the dimmer switch?)
In this case – sexual exploitation of underage girls – I guess I’m affected very deeply, as I’m a mum myself? This viewing something through a personal prism, I think, strips the viewing of objectivity. But then, I will – now that I know what the film is about – never watch it…
(Ok, very rambly response… but just what came to my head when I read this… as I said, it’s a mumsy response…)
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Rahul
March 26, 2014
““How much of this is exploitative and how much is necessary to tell us what really goes on “
I have been wondering about this from a different angle.
Summary is the title of this article
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/18/entertainment/la-et-cm-mn-killer-joe-violence-notebook-20120819
” the graphic reality of film can kill its drama”
And I quote-
“The filmmaking is gripping from start to finish, but graphic overkill ultimately diminishes our ability to respond to the drama.The characters of “Killer Joe,” caught up in a homicidal scheme that is treated with the casualness of a grocery list, have become desensitized to the coarseness and cruelty of their downtrodden lives. But the film is guilty of a kind of imitative fallacy. It desensitizes its audience to the squalor and abjection that the play, even when wallowing in the “detritus of the poor,as a stage direction infelicitously puts it, furtively satirizes as emblematic of an America run amok.”
The explicit scenes in “Blue is the warmest color” have also been criticized from different vantage points.
To me, both “Killer Joe” and “Blue is the warmest color” worked very well. I liked both of them a lot. A complete deconstruction would perhaps become a blog post of its own, but, succinctly , what I have been able to surmise about my reaction to these movies, is that, I liked them because the characters in the graphic scenes were fully realized (Matthew M in “a mesmerizing snakelike performance” and Adèle Exarchopoulos who lay bare her soul, along with her body) , and during the graphic scenes , they were not out of character.
To give a counter example, I was not able to sit through that scene in Irreversible. Maybe that is was what the director intended, but that is not my cup of tea, since the characters are more or less anonymous at that point, and you can react to it in only a very elemental way.
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Madhu
March 27, 2014
Riveting review. Impressive….nothing unusual there. As usual, I think I am more taken with the view from your vantage point. You at times take the most mundane of things and elevate it to metaphysical realms; I think you have this gift of being able to look at things more deeply than they seem…..a voracious reader at times acquires such an uncanny clairvoyance, me thinks; always have been and always will be an avid follower of yours.
I have not watched the movie….never will, for the same reason I couldn’t go through with the book “Lolita”…..!
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brangan
March 27, 2014
Rahul: That’s why these things are best considered on a case-by-case basis. And even in this, we have to consider the subjectivity factor. In other words, the excess sex and violence may work for me IN THIS FILM but not for you IN THE SAME FILM.
I liked “Killer Joe” a lot too.
Madhu: As usual, I think I am more taken with the view from your vantage point.
Thank you. And that really is the point of a review right? To see how someone else sees things? When you are deeply into a book, the characters aren’t just “characters in a story” but living breathing creatures whose fates you are involved with. Hence the “clairvoyance” you talk about — and I think it’s the same with the movies. It all boils down to how deeply you get into the material.
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Rahul
March 27, 2014
BR, of course, I spoke only for myself. Since you have seen Killer Joe, I would appreciate it if you comment on what the chicken drumstick scene did for you , cinematically.
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