Mrs directed by Arati Kadav shows the surrendered feminism witnessed and propagated in Indian households daily. The movie features patriarchy that sets an umbrage in you, yet when you ask the women in your home, they resonate with it. So does your neighbour- because the movie seems not to be devised from a screenplay but feels like footage from a basic Indian home.
Mrs is a slow-paced film that crawls on the consciousness of the audience to how easily a woman is rendered in the kitchen services with a perception of it being the natural order of things.
The original Malayalam version titled “The Great Indian Kitchen” was directed by a man, Jeo Baby, and was released at a crucial time to construct the narrative behind the proposal in Kamal Haasan’s party manifesto stating Tamil Nadu should recognize housework as labor and pay homemakers.
The Tamil and Hindi remakes follow the same story line changing the nuances slightly to suit the diversity. Mrs, directed by a woman Arati Kadav, features Richa as Sanya Malhotra and establishes her as a dancer in the opening credits and the next scenes are of a colourful marriage.
The gradual adjustment begins for Richa in her “new home” as she is expected to handle the kitchen like her mother-in-law. We see how her passion for dancing becomes just her hobby and her hobby of cooking as mentioned in her biodata becomes her constant and thankless job. Her husband Diwakar is a gynaecologist but understands nothing about a woman and his lack of empathy towards his wife and even his mother is appalling. The father-in-law is the epitome of conservatism with his shrewd and unapologetic views.
The question arises: what is enraging? The cooking? The lack of consideration. Whether it’s Richa’s sexual preference, her desire to do even a part-time job, her cooking, her cleaning, her fasting or her presence as a whole. The cooking done by men in the movie where they get all the ingredients chopped and arranged and leave a mess thereafter captures the gamut of the situation where the men in the family might get the economical lead or cook the mutton but the work of a housewife goes behind the main dish prepared.
The performances by actors Sanya Malhotra as Richa Sharma, Nishant Dahiya as Diwakar Kumar, Kanwaljit Singh as Ashwin Kumar (Diwakar’s father), and Aparna Ghoshal as Meena Kumar (Diwakar’s mother) do justice to script.
The direction is commendable as the plot and reaction to the film are also favorable. The subtility of ingrained patriarchy in the movie without any exaggeration is what brings the element of anxiety as to how “normal” it seems but problematic it actually is.
In the end, Richa realizes that she is a prime number, i.e., unbreakable, but how many more do?
