New Delhi: How do we deal with the lack of women’s safety in India? We can follow due process and punish perpetrators, educate and rehabilitate survivors or take matters into our own hands and fight fire with fire.
The public opinion on this right now seems to be in favour of the latter. Rani Mukerji’s Mardaani 2 echoes this very sentiment — and that does not bode well for us.
Picking up from where it had left off in its first installment, Mardaani 2 shows Mukerji’s famed character, Shivani Shivaji Roy, elevate to the post of a superintendent of police in Kota.
She takes on serial rapist and murderer Sunny (played by Vishal Jethwa), who is obsessed with her. Like Shivani, his victims are women who speak up, fight back, and appear ‘mardaani’ (like a man) in many ways. Sunny is also young, resourceful, highly intelligent and unhinged.
Shivani and Sunny play a game of cat and mouse, while she is forced to reckon with the baggage that comes with being a woman in power.
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Woman officer fighting the system
Directed by Gopi Puthran and produced by Aditya Chopra, the film sticks to its original template — lone woman police officer fighting the system (both patriarchal and criminal), one punch at a time.
In this film too, Shivani gives her male-dominated team zingers about not respecting women and being patronising. This time, though, she takes on the fight for feminism one notch higher by speaking for women everywhere. She fights for the victims, while making sure any victim-blaming, shaming, or any kind of patriarchal mindset is effectively nipped in the bud.
While the sentiment — shown through long, inspirational speeches or one-liners that stump men — is admirable and relatable, the film also justifies subverting the law.
Shivani is shown beating up men in an almost vindictive trance. The anger can be felt in every frame but the picture it shows is alarming, not only because it’s quite graphic but because it’s sending out a dangerous message — kill the rapists, because that’s the only way they’ll stop.
It is a stance that most of our police dramas take. Replace her with a buffed-up male actor, reduce the high morality, and you could easily mistake it for an installment of Simbaa or Singham.
Apart from the aggressive messaging, the film is watchable. It is fast-paced and action-packed. Puthran does not dawdle anywhere for more than a few seconds, and intermittently gets the villain to break the fourth wall, adding to the drama.
Jethwa’s character is well built, with his street smart acts and highly calculative nature but is given just enough of a handicap to remain beatable. Jethwa does a good job too, by switching characters and bringing forth the right amount of deranged anger to the character. Mukerji is, as always, efficient in playing a no-nonsense police officer.
Where the film fails, is in its staccato dialogues. Even an experienced actor like Mukerji fails to bring much feeling or flow to the words, making it mechanical and almost laughable in some scenes. The background score is sufficiently adrenaline-inducing but not memorable and the story predictable.
So why go see it? Do it only if you want to see an example of what will not solve the issue of violence against women. You just have to count the number of people applauding as the protagonist beats the villain black and blue to know what the film is actually inspiring.
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