| India, 2015 | Postmodern | Author Work | Trailer |
Part of the magic of cinema (what a cheesy term, huh?) is its amazing ability to connect and resonate with certain parts of the audience. Many times, this effect is aimed from the very conception of the movies: when a film wants to deal with a particular topic, it also seeks to bare its message to the demography that is the most concerned or affected with; or simply other times it just wants to form a special and endearing bond with the audience for the sake of building something precious. But, some other times this kind of spiritual connection can appear in the most mysterious and unexpected ways, and when this happens, crooking the original intention to new, wonderful directions, it’s when a true wonder, a really pure form of resonance, happens.
Angry Indian Goddesses has its message clear from the very beginning. It’s a film made by Indian women, and seeks to resonate with Indian women, and their delicate and thought-provoking position of precisely being women in India. This is basically the prompt of this work. We have seven characters coming from different backgrounds who just live their life in a vacation home on the tropical coast of Goa. There they can be themselves, share their joys and disgraces, and reflect on what it is to be themselves here and then, there and now. We have a fashion photographer that resigned from her job and is about to marry, her housemaid with a strong will and popular wit, a musician with an identity crisis, a housewife with an absorbing life ennui, a successful but highly troubled CEO, an aspiring actress that seeks her own path and an activist with a silent secret behind, and the connection they find and the relief they achieve on the others is wonderful, as different as they may seem at first.
But, it happens that this film is much more than this initial image.
I have always loved stories based around friendships. Seeing how the characters act and react, grow together, indirectly help each other to grow out of their prejudices and concerns, and how everything ends with a promise of a lodestar in the horizon for everybody verily brings warmth to my soul. It certainly is an archetype as long as humankind, as collective beings we are; and I can’t thank modern cinema enough to highlight this kind of situations revolving around connection and human warmth in the big screen, and also manage to deliver freshness to it at the same.
The whole Angry Indian Goddesses is set in a single setting -with the notable exception of the introductory scene-, and parallels single scene movies like 12 Angry Men in more depth than with its name alone. Akin to the latter, this movie hides a darkness behind that wants to unleash: the infuriating reality of what Indian women -and women everywhere- have to endure and deal with everyday. And with a wonderful sisterhood which has been dynamically built for the first half of the film, problems are fleshed out, troubles are strongly presented, and very dark consequences arise, which are dealt with raw anger and the common omertà groups of people in peril silently share. This duality between cunning silence and menacing anger is what characterizes Indian deity Kali, the most wrath-rich form of the divine feminity Hinduism conceives, and the characters verily are modelled after her as what they are.
This kind of storytelling, clearly based on classic archetypes with twists, manages to find its place among the finest postmodern works of today.
Nevertheless, the dynamism, raw emotion imprinted in this movie also manages to highlight the most human and tender aspects of the buddy movie premises I mentioned before. The actresses greatly associate themselves with their characters, as if their own life and identity were depending on the connection they want to establish and communicate to their audience. We become one more of their group, and the irresistible human warmth and teary joy we can see in the movie gets into us too. Because, no matter how dark life can become, there will be always some spark of warmth to share with others.
Zindagi, a word of Indoaryan origin that is shared by some languages of the region, means life, and the song of the same name that is featured here perfectly transmits all these feelings the film wants to connect with: sadness and joy, tenderness and warmth under a somber tone that is always present, and irresistible energy. And these are qualities that even me, an European male, can connect with, and I could really associate myself with the amazing characters Angry Indian Goddesses has brought to life to learn from them.
This movie has verily has left track in me, and for sure will enter my list of ever favourites.