Spoilers ahead…
Laila (Kalki Koechlin), the protagonist of Shonali Bose’s Margarita With a Straw, is like any other person in their late teens/early twenties, give or take a skill or two. She’s on Facebook. She’s terrific at chess. She’s into music – she writes lyrics for a band called Tribe. She’s friends with these musicians and she has a crush on the lead singer. She even sings a little, with her mother (Revathy), who she calls Aai. She laughs with her friends, She weeps when men she loves don’t love her back in that way. She swears. She fights with Aai. She makes up with Aai the way people in loving families do, invisibly, without manufacturing a production out of it. Oh, and she needs a wheelchair to get around because she’s afflicted with cerebral palsy.
With many filmmakers, this last aspect would eclipse everything else. One, because it’s the most obvious, visible thing. And two, this sort of thing really puts the fear of God in these filmmakers. They’re terrified they’ll be labelled insensitive, or that politically correct organisations will descend on them fuming with righteous indignation. And so they portray the afflicted person as a suffering saint. Or a conduit for a triumph-of-the-human-spirit message (though the overly symbolic last scene, as twee as the title, comes dangerously close). Or worse, a Wiki-page printout to be distributed to audiences, in order to “educate” them about the condition. I usually run a mile from these movies.
The utterly remarkable thing about Margarita is that Laila isn’t a differently abled person. She’s a person who is differently abled. The order of the words matters. The human being comes first, the condition only later. And like all humans, Laila craves intimacy, and not just a hug from Aai. Sanjay Leela Bhansali touched on this beyond-delicate issue in Black, when the deaf/blind protagonist wanted to know what it was like to be kissed – but Bose goes all the way. Laila talks to her wheelchair-bound classmate Dhruv (Hussain Dalal) about some “red top waali” he’s got his eyes on. She watches porn. And in a scene I’ve never seen on screen, she turns her wheelchair away from us and masturbates. I don’t know what was turning her on, but I kept thinking about Pahlaj Nihalani’s face.
In other words, take that wheelchair away and Laila is “normal.” The word comes up a few times in the movie. Dhruv has a crush on Laila, but she has feelings for that hunky singer. A disappointed Dhruv tells her, “Normal logon ke saath dosti karne se tum normal nahin ho jaaogi.” (You’re not going to become “normal” just because you hang out with “normal” people.) It’s refreshing, even touching, to hear this word used by someone in a wheelchair. No one knows better than Dhruv that, despite the efforts by the legions of the politically correct, he’d rather be “normal” than “special.” (I’m guessing Bose knows this too. The film is dedicated to her cousin Malini, who has cerebral palsy.) The film doesn’t make us pity Dhruv (or Laila, for that matter). It doesn’t call them abnormal. It just tells us that Dhruv defines normalcy the way a dictionary does, as “conforming to the standard or the common type.” The people around him who don’t need a wheelchair – to his eyes, they’re “normal.”
And he’s right about Laila. She yearns to be “normal.” In a too-strident scene that’s tonally off, Tribe gets the first prize at a rock competition, and the judge declares that it’s because the song’s lyrics were written by a “disabled” and “not normal” girl. Laila is furious. She retorts with a raised finger. The film’s conflict arises from this word, from the friction between desires that are “normal” and a physical state that isn’t quite.
And how can these desires not exist? Early on, we get the scene where Laila has to be carried up the stairs by two men, because the lift isn’t working. The camera sticks close to Laila’s face. Koechlin doesn’t do any semaphoric “acting,” and her blankness makes us want to read her mind. I thought we were being asked to respond to her helplessness, or perhaps her humiliation. But later, the New Delhi-based Laila moves to New York on an academic scholarship, and we get this scene where she is with her classmate Jared (William Moseley), and she needs to use the toilet. (Jared is another hunk; Bose appears to have cast the male roles with an eye on how easy on the eye these men are, so we know what Laila is reacting to.) Jared carries her in, and steps out. When she’s done, he comes back in, straightens her underwear, and lifts her from the seat. She clings to his shoulders for support, practically draping herself on him. And I saw that earlier scene, with the two men and the broken lift, in a new light. Given Laila’s condition, she’s constantly in positions that could be considered “romantic.” Men keep touching her. Men carry her. Men put their arms around her and lift her. They may look at the whole thing clinically, but surely all this physical proximity must be getting to her.
And then, we get the film’s biggest googly. In New York, Laila meets Khanum (a no-nonsense Sayani Gupta), who’s blind. The film takes on another disability – but again, there’s not a trace of stereotype, not a shred of self-pity. When we first see Khanum, she’s participating in a political protest that ends with tear-gassing. She makes a more radical statement with her style. She wears peacock-feather earrings, ornate rings, and in the film’s most moving moment (all the more moving for being so matter-of-fact), she applies eye shadow while getting ready for a date. She may not be able to see, but the ones who can need to know how hot she is, right?
Laila is one of those. She’s slowly drawn to Khanum, who’s gay, and discovers she’s bisexual. In her audience-friendly handling of hot-button issues, Bose is the multiplex version of Mani Ratnam. Her sense of humour is like his, delectably understated. Her narratives are like his, warm-hearted and mainstreamed, focusing more on the emotions of the characters than on the roughshod “reality” of their environment. (We don’t get much about, say, what it’s like being disabled in a country like India.) And this film features a Ratnamesque sprawl of ethnicities: a Maharashtrian mother, a Sikh father, an Assamese crush, a Pakistani-Bangladeshi Muslim girlfriend… But given that Bose’s films aren’t exactly “mainstream”, her sex scenes are bolder, and necessarily so. Not only has she made the kind of sexual-awakening film we rarely see in our cinema, she’s made one on a differently abled protagonist, one who coolly wheels into a store and asks for a vibrator. But there’s sexual confusion too. Even after Laila moves in with Khanum, she has sex with Jared – and who’s to say why? Maybe it’s just because she’s bisexual. Then again, maybe having sex with a man is another way of proving to the world (or at least to herself) that she’s “normal.”
The snide joke in Hollywood, especially around Oscar season, is that you’re guaranteed an award if you spend the movie stuck in a wheelchair – but Koechlin deserves all the recognition she’s getting. There’s a scene where she breaks eggs over a skillet, and cleans up the mess of shells and spilt yolk. There’s not one overdone motion. The woman sitting next to me murmured “bechaari,” and I wanted to tell her that Laila is anything but. The scene is practically a celebration of her independence, now that Aai is no longer around. You don’t think wheelchair. You think breakfast… yum!
Koechlin seems to be at her best when she’s playing some variant of a lost little girl. (It helps that her features look like they’re still being formed.) She played one in Dev.D. She plays one here. The scenes where she realises she’s attracted to Khanum are beautifully done. She plays an unplayable emotion, the feeling of having to redefine yourself after you thought you knew all there was to know about you. The best thing about Laila is that there’s none of that… nobility we’re asked to endure when differently abled characters show up on screen. Bose says it’s okay to laugh, at them, with them, and the upbeat (and excellent) background score reinforces this. When Laila’s creative writing professor asks her if she needs a writer to help her with an essay, she’s about to say no, and then she discovers that the writer is Jared. She says, “That would be wonderful.”
There are tears too, but they have nothing to do with – as you might have expected – Laila’s coming out to Aai. This happens during a scene that echoes an earlier one in which Aai was helping Laila bathe, and Laila announced that she had a crush on a guy. Now, the roles are reversed. Aai is unwell, and Laila is helping Aai bathe, and she tells Aai she likes Khanum. Aai is confused and angry, but she doesn’t break down. That happens elsewhere, in front of a mirror. Revathy gets her best scene, where she crumples from what seems to be sheer exhaustion. (She literally seems to deflate.) How much can one woman take? Margarita isn’t just about Laila. You can see Aai wishing, if only for that instant, that her life were “normal” too.
KEY:
- red top waali = that girl in the red top
- bechaari = poor thing
Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.
venkat1926
April 25, 2015
after the review eager to see the film.
LikeLike
Madhu
April 25, 2015
Oh, thank you! I wanted to ping/comment somewhere to ask you if you were doing a review of this movie, and here it is.
No one knows better than Dhruv that, despite the efforts by the legions of the politically correct, he’d rather be “normal” than “special.”
Truer words have never been said!
LikeLike
Vikram Sonni
April 25, 2015
BR, completely off-topic….did you review Birdman…if so, pl could you share the link…googled but couldn’t find it…
LikeLike
Aravindan
April 25, 2015
SPOILERS
The way the shot was framed alone stayed with me for a while. Great, thank you! (I almost left a comment asking whether you will write about this film).
I liked the film. I haven’t seen Bose’s previous film and hence wasn’t sure what to expect – this was truly a surprise and refreshing. The ‘treatment’ was consistently neat and was just a scene or two. The most stunning scene was when Laila’s mother removes the wig – I haven’t seen the disease being revealed this way before and only in the previous scene I was thinking why does her hair look strange.
I had issues with the way sexuality is incorporated within this film. It sets the first premise about disability quite remarkably so I was quite expectant. There are many people who discover their sexuality late in their life, no questions about that. As much as sexuality is fluid and it is not easy even for Laila to nail her sexuality, to have this as one of the issues in the film didn’t work for me. It simply needed more space and time. When Khanum accuses Laila that she used her even I for a few seconds sided with her. (You saw it as >Then again, maybe having sex with a man is another way of proving to the world (or at least to herself) that she’s “normal.”> I never saw this way – in fact, Khanum is the only and first exception in her sexual attractions – is it the last, we don’t know and that’s why it felt a bit vague and the whole sexuality was left open). It was more like the beginning of discovery of sexuality and somehow it didn’t feel complete to me in this film. That’s where I felt the film is chewing more than it needs to.
I caught the film here in the US as part of a film festival and the brochure spoke more about the sexuality than the disability, so I wasn’t surprised to walk into a hall packed with almost women. I happened to sit next to a very young lesbian American couple – too young and too much in love – if you see a cute puppy on screen you feel like saying out loud awww cute puppy and immediately feel the need to kiss your partner – that young and that much in love. And I was amused to watch, or rather hear their reactions to the film. They hated Laila when she made love with the guy, but when she reasons out “because he could see me”, I am afraid they wanted to kill her 😀 It’s quite understandable that bisexuals might be met with mistrust even within the community. Yet Khanum didn’t come across as one person. And that’s why it feels even more that the film could have done a bit more.
I also kept thinking the film almost followed Queen’s narrative path, like Queen With A Straw.
LikeLiked by 4 people
gowthamanmoviebuff
April 26, 2015
That was a fantastic one !! Though I liked the movie one fact was haunting me in the movie! There was so much of disability kept on creeping in !! That was the only issue! Otherwise a valiant effort about exploring sexual intricacies of differently abled person or rather a person who is differently abled ! 😊
LikeLike
Paresh
April 26, 2015
Hi!
I was waiting for your take on this. I think we both saw this film from the opposite ends.
I live that kind of life on a daily basis (even the experience of watching this film was very similar to the one Laila when she was carried on the wheelchair up the stairs, as Cinemax has no wheelchair friendly seating in Kochi).
I thought that this film went overboard focussing on the libido of the girl. And, most of the situations just lead to that as you mention about the toileting scene. In ‘normal’ circumstances we’d use adult diaper when venturing into an alien terrain or in extreme cases are accustomed to hold natural calls for long hours (as there is even the fear of sexual abuse lurking in the back of your mind).
And, you get asexual to touch as you need help to do tasks that are taken for granted by the ‘normal’ people. You embarrass yourself further if you feel aroused in such a situation.
Here is my take on the film:
http://pareshcp.blogspot.in/2015/04/margarita-with-straw.html
I think it has hit the bullseye as far as reaching out to the mainstream audience is concerned.
Thanks & regards,
Paresh
LikeLiked by 4 people
olemisstarana
April 27, 2015
BR: Loved your review. Showed it to the better half as well who works in physical medicine and rehabilitation and generally found it very reminiscent of our (D & mine) conversations about how to parenthesize issues of this color… “The utterly remarkable thing about Margarita is that Laila isn’t a differently abled person. She’s a person who is differently abled.”
I must, however, add a however here… (@Paresh) Jared Leto was lauded for his portrayal of a trans woman in “The Dallas Buyer’s Club” but was also met with less ecstatic reaction. An op-ed in TIME went as far as this headline: “Don’t applaud Jared Leto’s Transgender Mammy” essentially equating Hollywood’s self-congratulatory fist pumps to breaking stereotypes and boundaries to the decades ago similar reaction to Hattie McDaniels winning the Oscar for her turn in the movies. No racism in Hollywood any more! I agree, a little hesitantly, with Paresh – why must we go so far afield with these roles and the people who fill them? How many roles will there ever be for women with cerebral palsy out there in the future? Alternatively, why even frame the question that way – why aren’t roles written for people who happen to have less familiar abilities than “normal” folks where the difference in abilities is not the focus? (Breaking Bad, Walt Jr.)
That being said, here is another however. I don’t have an appreciation for the challenges faced by filmmakers when they attempt to fund their work. Is Kalki an easier sell? Is the prioritizing of battles the prerogative of the film maker? I wonder if Sonali Bose would have been damned either way.
Finally, a little shaking of a finger regarding this:
“But there’s sexual confusion too. Even after Laila moves in with Khanum, she has sex with Jared – and who’s to say why? Maybe it’s just because she’s bisexual. Then again, maybe having sex with a man is another way of proving to the world (or at least to herself) that she’s “normal.”
Why must we all force ourselves to categorize? The flurry around these terms is a little tiresome. She’s young, vital, sexual, experimenting in a new environment, and happy with it.
There’s a really interesting, irreverent film festival here called HUMP, founded by Dan Savage who is a sex columnist and LGBT activist. HUMP is an amateur porn festival that aims at celebrating everything that is not mainstream pornography. The gaze here is diverse and so are the objects of the gaze. It’s amateur and strictly remains so, which means that none of these movies (shorts, more like it) are ever available for perpetual internet consumption, otherwise I would link to one short here. The short I will never forget is an account of one day in the life of a young woman in New York City. She’s a working professional, and negotiates the city like any other young woman, buses, subways, busy streets. She has cerebral palsy and the film maker sees the city through her eyes. We see what she sees, from her vantage point and what a similar, but different city it is! She ends her day in her room, her space, and as she exhales the stresses of the day away, she masturbates – and since this is an amateur porn festival, there is no turning away. I hesitate to even describe this moment because it just is. It’s not beautiful or brave or path breaking, or different. It just is and the breathtaking matter-of-factness and existence and (dare I say it!) “normalcy” of the moment is what makes it for me.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Cinemakkaran
April 27, 2015
I hope there’s you are planning to write a review of ‘ Court’ soon, will be hugely disappointed if there isn’t one. also off topic 😀
LikeLike
Santosh Kumar T K
April 27, 2015
@olemisstarana the starkville bulldogs scream bow bow wow wow! 🙂 🙂
LikeLike
SR
April 27, 2015
Don’t have access to such movies in US since the ‘desi’-monkey dancing types dominate the multiplexes unfortunately ; your review makes it very interesting (in that it wasn’t a typical screenplay). Coincidentally, just saw ‘blue is the warmest color’ – if you’ve seen it, what was your opinion. My final takeaway is that it’s just a love story (realistic/non-idealized kind where people mess up / repercussions). Simple, nuanced story (family dynamics, interesting/pertinent details on high school literature…. all patiently observed, not edited out – redolent of Ozu film but with more camera angles). Beyond any visual titillation, very fulfilling – if your time permits, enjoy!
LikeLike
brangan
April 27, 2015
Paresh: thank you for putting up that comment on the blog.
olemisstarana: Well, I was using the word “normal” not from my POV but from the POV of Dhruv, who hints that that’s what Laila yearns to be. The film, I thought, could be read entirely through this prism.
SR: Oh, I did see “Blue…” Outstanding film. When I see performances like these, I sometimes wonder what it is we keep praising in the regular commercial films 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
olemisstarana
April 27, 2015
@Santosh Kumar TK: And Col Reb shakes his walking stick at you and yells “Geroff my lawn!”
😀
*I know I know, but black bears are so much more generic. And less racist. I should have probably gone with that.
LikeLiked by 1 person
venkatesh
April 27, 2015
What a joy to read about this film … , cant wait to see this.
olemisstarana: I caught up with HUMP in 2012,2013 in NYC , missed it last year , hope to make it this year. It truly is a joy
LikeLiked by 1 person
olemisstarana
April 27, 2015
This is veering off topic, but I just could not stomach “Blue…” And please know that this is purely a socio/cultural critique, stylistically the movie was pretty darn good.
First of all, it’s not that exciting to see two conventionally beautiful, young white, straight women in the title roles and secondly, the girl is 15 for pete’s sake. I know the age of consent in France is 15, but no… just no. Emma grooms Adele, and if this had been a cis- love story our discourse would have been very, very different.
LikeLike
venkatesh
April 27, 2015
IN the same vein – there is a Korean film called Oasis , made in 2002. If anyone gets a chance – i recommend it highly.
LikeLike
Santosh Kumar T K
April 27, 2015
BR, kalki koechlin = kangna ranaut of 2005/2006/2007?
also, does kalki koechlin mildly remind you of a young Obama?
LikeLiked by 2 people
Madhu
April 28, 2015
Santosh Kumar TK : I thought it was only me!
LikeLike
Santosh Kumar T K
April 28, 2015
madhu, which part? i really hope the BO one! 🙂 it is uncanny.
LikeLike
Madhu
April 28, 2015
The obama-koechlin connection. Pattern matching is my humble hobby. 🙂
LikeLike
dracarys
April 29, 2015
Hey, just read your review.
Is this movie inspired by the Brazilian movie ‘the way he looks’????
LikeLike
Subha
April 30, 2015
Sir… I am making a “I heart brangan” T-shirt. You’ve pointed out so many things that I missed. Awesome review…
LikeLike
aparna
May 25, 2015
What exactly did the director mean to say with the last scene?
LikeLike