Daily Times

Sridevi delivers a powerful performance as the film’s titular character in Ravi Udyawar’s ‘Mom’.

Hers is a towering presence in the film that features a number of talented actors in its cast. Thankfully, Ravi Udyawar does not allow her to overshadow the remarkable work of other actors and ensures that all cast members deliver both as individuals and as members of a gifted ensemble.

Good acting is but one of Mom’s many strengths. The film excels in a number of areas, most notably direction, editing, production design and cinematography. Sadly, its one area of weakness – writing – takes away from all others, rendering it an initially brilliant, mildly engaging, and ultimately disappointing movie, instead of the great one it could and should have been.

A successful schoolteacher, Devki Sabarwal lives with her husband, Anand, and two daughters in a well-appointed Delhi apartment. Arya, who is Anand’s daughter from an earlier marriage, has an uneasy relationship with Devki, whom she respects but refuses to accept as her mother. Devki loves Arya like her own and is determined to win her over. The life of the happy family is turned upside down when Arya decides to attend a raucous, drug-fuelled Valentine’s Day party, against her parents’ better judgement but with their permission. At the party, Arya is approached first by class fellow Mohit and subsequently by his friend Charles Diwan. Interested in another young man, she rudely turns both men down. Publicly snubbed in front of their peers, Mohit and Charles decide to teach Arya a lesson with the help of hooligan Jagan and watchman Baburam. The four men abduct Arya from the parking lot of the venue and take turns raping her. The crime takes place in an SUV as it travels through Delhi’s empty roads in the dead of the night. The audience gets an aerial view of the vehicle and is left to imagine the rapes as they take place. Reminiscent of the real-life 2012 rape of the 23-year-old physiotherapy intern, Jyoti Singh Nirbhaya, on a moving bus in Delhi. This is a particularly effective scene that sends shivers up one’s spine. Arya survives the rape and manages to identify her assailants who get to walk free after a poorly crafted trial. Hurt, angry and frustrated, Divya vows revenge and tracks down each one of the four rapists to deliver frontier justice on her own. She is helped by private detective Daya Shankar Kapoor and an initially suspicious, but eventually helpful, policeman named Mathew Francis. Through a series of illogical and inane contrivances, Devki exacts revenge, gets Arya to accepts her as a mother, manages to evade the law, brings her family together, and gets ready to start a life happier than the one she had before Arya was raped.

The most chilling sequence of ‘Mom’ – the one in which where Arya is repeatedly raped in a moving vehicle – marks the point where ‘Mom’ ceases to be a good film and steadily devolves into a cheap thriller that takes idiocy, banality and absurdity to levels too low even by Bollywood standards. This is unfair not only to viewers but also to the cast and crew of the film whose work is significantly better than is needed, or deserved, by ‘Mom’.

The flawless first 30 minutes of ‘Mom’ display an emotional acuity, narrative intelligence and deft pacing that is completely missing from the two hours that follow. The cast and crew are up to delivering a psychological drama that intelligently examines the aftermath of the tragedy, displays an understanding of the plight of Arya, gets inside the heads of the criminals, allows its characters to come alive on screen, makes intelligent observations about crime and punishment in twentieth century India, and sets the stage for a serious discussion about the preponderance of rape in the country.

Writer Girish Kohli does not have time for any of that. The feeble story that he decides to tell is trite, ineffective and stale. It has been told before – many, many times – and holds no charm and interest any more.

Kohli is unfair to the actors, in particular. The character of Mathew Francis is underwritten and gives no room to Akshaye Khanna to display his considerable histrionic skills. He is given the corniest of lines and woefully limited screen time. His verbal exchanges with Devki, instead of being clever, are both artificial and annoying. Arya’s plight is conveyed through tantrums, crying and shrieking; there is not even a feeble attempt to understand what goes on inside the mind of a rape victim. Taking showers at odd hours is not all that a victim does after having been violated. Adnan Siddiqui looks good and turns in a wonderfully understated performance as the father of the rape victim. Unfortunately, he is not given the backstory that is needed to explain the steely control and restraint with which he handles the tragedy. The character of Daya Shankar Kapoor is overwritten as a caricature of similar characters that have appeared in films umpteen times. He is forced to deliver trite lines and stale jokes that are neither funny nor appropriate for a film dealing with the subject of rape. The four actors playing the rapists, especially Mumbai Drama School alumnus Adarsh Gourav, are truly excellent as perpetrators of a heinous crime and their stories and never told and their behaviour never examined.

The terribly flawed court trial sequence, Devki’s unbelievable transformation into a cold-blooded killer, the incredible healing of a castration victim within three days, the remarkable speed at which forensic labs deliver results, huge gaping holes in the narrative, the murky treatment of ethical and moral issues surrounding street justice, and a denouement that is as silly as it is rushed – there is no shortage of problems with Mom’s script. That the film manages to hold one’s attention in spite of the woefully inadequate script is a testament to the talents of the actors and crewmembers of the film. With a better script, the team could have easily turned ‘Mom’ into one of the best Indian films of the year 2017.

Kohli is not the only one who disappoints in ‘Mom’. AR Rahman’s music and background score is uneven and unworthy of a music director of his stature. Naveen Kunar’s flute and Taufiq Qureshi’s tabla pieces are beautiful but their haunting effect is quickly diluted by the cacophony of the background score used in action sequences. Similar to the music of earlier James Bond films, it is loud, jarring and obnoxious. It does not belong in a 2017 film dealing with a serious and sombre subject.

Of course, it is wrong to complain about the music of a film that has many, much bigger problems and deals with the aftermath of rape in the most cavalier of manners, offering vigilantism as a viable, satisfying and effective solution to a problem that plagues India and much of the world.

The writer writes about culture, history and arts and is based in Dallas, US. He tweets at @allyadnan and can be reached at allyadnan@outlook.com

Published in Daily Times, August 20^th 2017.