This isn’t the angry film I thought it would be. It is, surprisingly, filled with laughter and hope, and a solid companion piece to ‘Uyare’.
Spoilers ahead…
What is it about acid attacks that makes them possibly the worst possible crime on a woman? Listen to this phrase from the gorgeous and heartfelt Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy number that plays over the titles of Chhapaak: “chhapaak se pehchaan le gaya“. One splash, and your identity is gone. Not your looks. Your identity. The things one sees and recognises you by — the nose, the cheeks, the mouth. All that’s gone. Walking into Meghna Gulzar’s film, you expect this horrific theme to repeat itself, and it does. What you don’t expect is the acid-attack survivor who giggles that — with the compensation money she will get from the government — she might go in for Alia Bhatt’s looks. This is a movie about despair. It is also, surprisingly, filled with laughter and hope.
Meghna and her co-writer Atika Chohan opt for a very unusual structure. Chhapaak opens with images of a protest. “We want justice!” Hundreds of angry citizens strain against police barricades — but the thing they are railing against is an incident of rape. What has this got to do with Malti’s (Deepika Padukone) story, based on the real-life survivor Laxmi Agarwal whose PIL resulted in a set of restrictions on the sale of acid? The point is that rape is so widely reported and rallied against that acid attacks occupy a lower rung in the hierarchy of crimes against women. The point is that there isn’t much difference in the punishment for throwing hot tea on someone’s face versus throwing acid. The point is that acid attacks aren’t always about advances being rebuffed. It could also be that you are from an oppressed caste and dream of becoming a software engineer, and someone higher up the societal chain decides that this dream must literally be scorched.
As well-intended and necessary as these messages are, you don’t want a movie that keeps lecturing at you with the bluntness of a placard. This is, again, where the structure helps. We meet Malti seven years after the attack, when the “wound” has healed to an extent, both externally and internally. We are never allowed to forget the magnitude of what happened — because we are shown, painstakingly, how slowly and how horribly a face changes after acid is splashed on it. This montage, which appears early on, is always at the back of the mind. And yet, Chhapaak isn’t the angry film I thought it would be. It isn’t the equivalent of Malti’s agonised scream when she catches sight of herself in the mirror after the attack.
And we come to the often-overlooked point that writing for the screen, about an issue, is very different from writing a heartfelt editorial. The latter is about the what. The former is also about the how. It’s not just that you want to show what happened to Malti, but also how you want to show it all. Manu Ashokan’s Uyare went about the subject in a chronological manner, where you develop the characters first and then stage the acid attack. Chhapaak follows a more convoluted structure that dares to ask a difficult question: Why not look at Malti after she has gotten over the immediacy of the trauma, after she has begun to get on with her life.
Our first glimpse of the seven-years-later Malti, thus, is at a beauty parlour. As a “touch”, it’s undoubtedly heavy-handed. But Meghna and editor Nitin Baid keep the film flowing so smoothly that the heaviness doesn’t linger. (Malay Prakash’s cinematography bathes the film in light as gentle as its tone. There’s no high-contrast work. The cinematography isn’t “heavy”, either.) This beauty parlour is just one of many places Malti is trying to get employed in. She wants to move on. She tells her father she has had enough of counselling. There’s another potentially “heavy” moment where a prospective employer tells Malti that she never told him she looked like this. She doesn’t seethe. She doesn’t seem stung. She simply says there’s no space in the application form for “Are you an acid-attack victim?”. It’s an extension of the opening scene, a subtle plea to begin to see acid attacks as a separate category of violence.
I did not care at all for Raazi, but after seeing Chhapaak, I think I see better what the problem is. I don’t think tense, tight, melodramatic plot machinations are Meghna’s thing. I think she is more like her father, and in the loose way Chhapaak wraps itself around its core issue, it really feels like one of his films. Even when Malti’s case is in progress (or later, during her PIL sessions), we never see her seethe and rage. Her most poignant lines are barely a whisper: “Kitna achcha hota agar acid bikta hi nahin. Milta bhi nahin to phenkta bhi nahin.” The heavier emotions are left to a rich benefactress and Malti’s lawyer (a quietly forceful Madhurjeet Sarghi), whose husband (Anand Tiwari) is a delightfully Gulzarian figure. He is the Sanjeev Kumar at home while his wife Suchitra Sens her way around the aandhi of various courtrooms, and their daughter becomes the film’s marker of time. First, she is a little girl complaining about her pigtails. By the end, she is a teenager trying to sneak out in a miniskirt.
This is not to say that Chhapaak snatches away all agency from Malti. In her own way, she is running a crusade. There’s that PIL, for one — it’s her doing. Plus, she finds work in an NGO for acid-attack survivors run by Amol (Vikrant Massey) — and who better to understand and empathise with what these women are going through? Vikrant Massey is terrific as a driven man who’s afraid the world will come to a halt if he relaxes even for a second. And it’s with him that Chhapaak takes its boldest narrative leap. Amol becomes Malti’s love interest, a situation described by a very Gulzarian phrase: “silent pyaar“.
Uyare — where Parvathy Thiruvothu played the acid-attack survivor, named Pallavi — skirted around this issue a bit, with the character played by Tovino Thomas. At the end, Pallavi says “let’s be friends”. That is certainly one way to write such a story, because given the circumstances, we feel love is perhaps too minor a deal: there are More Important Things to be dealt with. But now that seven years have passed, Chhapaak asks: But why not? It’s touching to see a woman like Malti not hide herself from the world. It’s important to break the Beauty and the Beast fairy-tale cliché that looking different means locking yourself up. The superb subversion, here, is that the conventionally good-looking Amol is more of a “beast”, in the way he snaps and snarls. You expect that he’d be the one to draw Malti out of her shell. Marvellously, it’s the other way around.
This confidence in Malti affected me hugely. Chhapaak comes at acid attacks from all possible angles: from the cops investigating the case to the lawyers in court, from the insensitive reporter who asks Malti “Aage shaadi ka kya plan hai?” to her brother who is teased in school about having a “beast” for a sister. But the film isn’t only about darkness. Get this! While preparing for the case, Malti’s lawyer takes the time to train a student. It’s a brilliant touch that expands the universe of the film. Thanks to Malti, this young man — who has no real reason to be in the movie, whom we would not miss even if he were absent — is getting a lesson about how courtrooms work. There’s a bracing practicality about Chhapaak, especially when it addresses that reporter’s question: “Aage shaadi ka kya plan hai?”
Even the first call between Malti and Amol has traces of a meet-cute in a rom-com. We are so conditioned to notions of “propriety” that some viewers may balk at what may appear as trivialising Malti’s life. Aren’t there more important things she should be doing? But I loved that she wanted the same things other girls her age want — and yes, she’s a mere schoolgirl when the attack happens. Deepika is just lovely. She does this thing where she scrunches in her shoulders and grins almost sheepishly, and even later, when the prosthetic makeup comes on, this tic registers. These portions in school lead to the final writing flourish, because this is when we see what Malti was really like before a man destroyed her life — this girl with big dreams, this girl who had a crush on a boy who gave her a rose, this girl who danced to the Kal Ho Naa Ho title song (which comes back to haunt her later).
Chhapaak doesn’t leave you shattered, exactly — because the tone of the narrative is deceptively casual. There are places that feel rushed, where I wanted to get into Malti’s headspace a little more. But I was grateful the film did not focus on the obvious and always kept trying to reframe the trauma in new ways, take it to new places — like that romance. Because by the end, it’s clear that that happy ending, if it indeed is one, is only for Amol and Malti. There are other girls who will not be so lucky. Even while zooming in on this one woman, Chhapaak never loses sight of the larger world outside. Amol tells Malti — he wonders aloud, actually — that we all have evil inside us, but some of us act on it. Why? It’s an enormous existential conundrum, but it feels balloon-light because the conversation assumes the tone of a casual chat, and it’s staged in the most casual of locations, a bus. What could have been a “message” becomes a musing. Like everything else in the film, there’s a welcome touch of lightness.
Copyright ©2020 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.
Sahir.
January 13, 2020
Hi Mr Rangan, how does your viewing of the film help you respond to the “hand-wringing” piece you wrote last week?
I wasn’t terribly impressed with the film myself. The back-and-forth structure didn’t work for me (even though I’ve bought far more complex flashback structures, like in Barfi), and I felt like the film didn’t do enough. What, for instance, was Malti’s brother doing in the film? I wish they’d developed his relationship with her much more, he just ended up feeling like a prop. The first half especially felt too low-key, it didn’t move or grip me at all. Was a little disappointed. Also, Deepika Padukone was really good, but is she just a little too old now to buy as a nineteen-year-old?
Another thing, I do think Meghna Gulzar needs to have more songs in her film — she evidently feels the need for music and I heard the title song way too many times.
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ravenus1
January 13, 2020
I was also comparing the film to Uyare while watching. As you say, Chapaak is to be commended for not being a preachy angsty piece. Thanks to the excellent prosthetic work and quiet underplaying, Deepika Padukone is convincing as the acid attack survivor who reclaims her life and gets over being a sufferer (love the scene where she tells off a truculent Massey about having every damn right to party if she wants to)
But she is far less believable as the lower middle-class public school educated dilli-waali she is supposed to be (the scene where she stumbles over “barbaric” seems so forced and at odds with her diction otherwise). Also I felt the flashback to “before the attack” we get towards the end is both needless and gauche.
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guhanasp
January 13, 2020
@brangan Sort of digression from the topic…. it is sad to see somany commenters in your youtube channel who can’t differentiate the subjective quality of films flocks to flippant your critique by calling you with labels like ‘hypocrite’ ‘paid reviewer’ when you are reviewing so called ‘mass’ movies.
How could anyone can call out hypocrisy in art? Art creates different reaction to different people. When one single art can have such different interpretations, how could you compare two different works of art? Are mass masala movies are just commodified checkboxes with narration backed by market research who empirically gathered the data from test audiences? If that is the case, hypocrisy can be applied. This just proves that these mass audiences only have herd mentality; they can’t interpret their own opinions. Such insecure people!
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Prachee
January 13, 2020
I’m so grateful that you have not pitted this film against “Uyare”, but call it a companion piece instead. Like Gulzar said in one of the promotional events, this film is part of a movement. Both “Uyare” and “Chhapaak” are a part of that movement and they both focus on different aspects of an acid attack survivor’s experiences and struggles.
I was disappointed by your piece on this film last week, but this review makes for that. Thank you.
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vidya sridhara (@VidyaSridhara)
January 14, 2020
Came out of the theatre with similar feelings of not being overburdened by the heaviness of the topic the movie addresses. Able dialogues, direction and able acting made it work. Malti’s journey from being in bed and in pain (of all sorts) to being able to take on life with such optimism and enthusiasm would have been something I wanted to watch more of…how did this transition come within her…how did she beat her own fears? rather than just her reaction to how people around her behaved.
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H. Prasanna
January 14, 2020
@BR This single-handed crusade of yours steering cinema storytelling at the cusp of social messaging is truly amazing (like watching the hero in Ben-Hur or Ejamaan). In all your interviews and reviews, you take up this issue very seriously and it is very clear you yearn for cinema gleaned off this need for messaging and focusing on things that will mark the next great evolutionary shift of the art (which would inadvertently greatly help the social messaging).
I hope someone invests in a rejoinder movie to Uyare and Chhapaak that is well-written, amoral, and problematic (less Kabir Singh or the English Joker, more Elle or Revenge) and sparks off a storytelling rivalry a la the content rivalry in High Noon vs Rio Bravo. I am waiting for your take on that movie. Because honestly it is hard for me to watch the writer who turned me to cinema writing (with Part of the Picture, “In the Mood for Love”) to defend the likes of Bigil in this crusade.
Having said that, I do hope the next great evolutionary shift of the art is setting socially responsible storytelling as the new baseline. Cinematic storytelling, in its present commercial form, takes everything from society in its conception and demands more during consumption. So, there is no way a movie which works in layers explores storytelling for the sake of it.
P.S. If there was such a movie and I missed your take on it, forgive my ignorance and point me in that direction via weblink.
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brangan
January 14, 2020
H. Prasanna: I’m not sure I entirely get you, but just for the record, I am not against messaging in the movies. I am only against obvious and wordy “placard messaging” 🙂
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Aditya
January 14, 2020
We expect to see a victim to be crippled, physically and mentally. We expect a survivor to struggle and fight his/her way to the top. Only after countless fights in the second act, should the protagonist win. That’s the popular way of screenwriting and that’s how we are conditioned to view. Maybe that’s the reason many film reviewers will say that the “writing is weak”.
Rangan ji, your review is a happy departure.
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Dhruv Krishna Goyal
January 14, 2020
Great review, as usual, Mr. Rangan! As someone who thought the structure of the film was a problem (like Sahir pointed out), your piece definitely made me think more about the “deceptive casualness” of it. If I may ask, though, what do you make of the decision to include a flashback of the incident at the end? I was content on reading the film as more about Malti’s resilience and “spirit” rather than as a vicitm. But, the decision to end by going back to her life pre-accident undid so much of that for me. I, more or less, left feeling if she has (“in spirit”) gone past that and made a living for herself, why even show the whole build-up. Maybe her speaking about it the court, in the film’s “present tense,” would feel more faithful to her character’s arc in this film.
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H. Prasanna
January 14, 2020
@BR Thanks for the reply; sorry for the rambling.
Placard messaging or not, the central thread in your writing is about the message. How the messaging gets across; what are the ideas we included with the message; how differently the message was delivered. But, there is another type of cinema writing that talks not only about delivery of messages. You keep evolving as a reviewer who understands the message delivery system and its nuances.
A thread of messaging runs through every movie; filmmakers reveal their understanding of a message whether they like to or not (regardless of how explicitly they deal with it in the content). Based on what is unaddressed in your reviews, I think you want filmmakers and screenwriters to explore their choices in filmmaking independent of their message; not only think how well they can deliver a message but how well they can make movies?
As you have said, cinema is a very limiting form of message delivery system. But, it is the understanding of film that I am yearning for in your writing. I feel you are striving to make the review of a film a place for understanding film, not just the message it delivers. And in every review, you are drawing attention to a film by starting and ending with the message the film delivers. I hope some student of cinema comes and makes a film where this template of the message delivery system is broken. And you will write a definitive review where the message is just another aspect you deal with.
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tonks
January 14, 2020
Gladdened to hear that the movie has already brought about positive changes that too from a BJP government :
https://www.idiva.com/news-opinion/news/deepika-padukones-chhapaak-inspires-bjp-ruled-uttarakhand-to-give-pension-to-acid-attack-survivors/18005885
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Mudit
January 15, 2020
Strangely, this echoed my sentiments so much after watching the film last night. I penned them down here before i read this review of yours: https://myrealillusions.wordpress.com/2020/01/15/chhapaak-the-acid-of-our-minds/
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brangan
January 15, 2020
The ending totally worked for me. Just at the point we know of Malti’s victory, just when she has found Amol, just when her demons are finally over, we get this flashback that tells us WHAT WAS LOST!
Yes, she won, finally. But the flashback makes us see that THAT could have been Malti’s life — walking with a girlfriend, accepting a rose from a boy, the things that mean nothing in the larger scheme of things but also mean everything, in a way.
Yes, she is now a famous crusader and all — but the flashback reminds us that she may have been an un-famous nobody, and all the happier for it.
My only (small) issue was that it went on for a bit. But I totally was on board with its positioning — especially in a drama that’s not hammering its points home.
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Parvathi
April 20, 2020
I thought DP didn’t fit the movie well. She always has an undertone of flamboyance in her acting, and that did not work at all in a movie where she is required to be vulnerable and display simplicity. She adds some of the signature pieces of her acting to this role as well, but this is the complete opposite of a Bhansali movie or Cocktail (which are the films that largely shaped her as an actor).
Also, it’s super on trend for an actor to play someone who is socially stigmatized nowadays, so I don’t get how this movie was a risk at all?? She got so much praise for being “brave” and all, but look at what Ayushmann has become while doing the same thing. Yes, I get that she is a woman and is largely defined by her looks, but that fact that she is defined that way makes it even more likely for DP to gain praise for doing a role like this. She got minimal flack for actually choosing to play the role; she was mainly criticized for how she behaved while promoting the role.
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