Sexy Durga

This movie won 1st prize in the Tiger Competition of the Rotterdam film festival 2017, which I know now but not yet when seeing it. Being selected as one of the only eight nominees for this competition, gives rise to expectations. But alas, I cannot think of any reason why this movie deserved such a prestigious place. As explained in the final paragraph below, this movie will definitely have more impact on viewers living in India, highlighting things that are not so obvious for us living here in a Western country. It will explain the "horror" label better, because it did not work on me that way.

There were a few interesting things, however, to start on a positive note. Always nice to see some foreign folklore around religious festivities. We see dancers in trance, people lifted on meat hooks in their bodies while driven around yet not at all looking in pain, people running through still heated remains of a bonfire, statues carried around, and more such local folklore. Apart from that shown in an extensive opening scene, plus a few extra fragments later, the journey of the two lovers on the run was clearly the main course.

The scene with the policemen was also a bit of local folklore. This was police harassment in full colors, in spite of a complete lack of violence, just pestering with useless questions while looking for ways to let them pay further fines for relatively trivial offenses. It was remarkable that the police overlooked the real offenses, like the fact that the car was stolen, and that the driver had no license. Also, the two passengers on the back seat (our hitchhiking couple) were only glanced at and not asked any pertinent question. After the foursome were allowed to continue their journey, one of the men wondered whether it were real policemen, something that seems to happen there all the time.

The synopsis on the festival website announced this movie as "horror", and it is also one of the IMDb genre labels, but I found it not so much belonging to that category. The two lovers are trying to hitchhike and were invited by two men in a van, who were asking a lot of questions and pressured the couple for answers, like where they were heading. They asked these questions apparently with good intentions, not only to have a pleasant conversation while underway, but also with intent to drop them at an appropriate place. Nevertheless, it came over as intimidating, though the two men repeatedly were confused to see that the couple wanted to leave the car several times. It reminded me of a recent movie Nocturnal Animals (2016, Tom Ford), with a really horrific scene in which a car with a man, wife and daughter is threatened by a gang, who make it extra frightening by mixing helpfulness and intimidation, confusing the victims as well as viewers about their real intentions, and letting us constantly in suspense how this would end.

Back to Sexy Durga: Later on, they managed to leave the van while some cases with "tomatoes" (their words; I'd rather assume weapons) were unloaded. After that intermediate stop, two extra men joined the two in the van. In separate shots we see the runaway couple continuing their journey on foot, but were held up by two men on a motorbike, who were very insistent to know who they were and what their destination was. This felt, in my opinion, more threatening than the previous scenes in the van. To their rescue came aforementioned van (now with four men inside) and they were taken in again, this time fully packed with four men plus the couple. In spite of everyone being aware that the couple wanted to be brought to a railway station, they even passed one while heavily discussing that they never had hurt the couple, wondering why they were scared all the time. This on-and-off repeated a few times, but the tension went past me all the time. Maybe the situation was too artificial for me to get involved.

An important topic in this movie was the position of women. We saw in the beginning that the woman-half of the runaway couple ignored direct questions when asked by the men in the van, but replied via the man who accompanied her. Also in the beginning the couple said that they were friends, but later on changed their story and maintained they were man and wife. It was a wise move, given the recent (2 years ago?) stories of what can happen to women in India who are not in "proper" company (husband, father or brother). In the incident that was covered by our newspapers, some men decided that a woman without proper company was immoral and hence deemed a proper target for a mini-gang-rape. It was clear from the media that this was not a rare incident, but similar things happen all the time and the rapists are seldom punished. Returning to the film at hand: all this will be obvious to the people living in that country, considerably adding to the "horror" feeling, something that is less obvious to us here in a Western country.

Finally, the Tiger Competition jury awarded this movie a first prize. As usual, as a professional jury they found very different from the audience (=people like me), as this movie ranked at a lowly 136th place for the audience award. This demonstrates, again and again, the large gap that exists between professional viewers versus the public, both groups watching movies with different eyes and finding other aspects important.

This one starts strangling audiences from the start, in between leaves the throat just to change its hand and then holds back again. Perfect drama. special mention for cinematographer and very creative use of music.

Young Indian men in loincloths are worshipping the Hindu goddess Kali by entering trance states dancing ecstatically, piercing their cheeks with arrows, fire-walking or enabling them to be suspended on meat hooks whilst being gently rocked parading with noisy music through crowds of devotees. Following these ritual scenes is a frightening car-ride in real time with young men, who offer a lift to a hitch-hiking couple, Durga and Kabeer aiming to get to a railway station. What initially looks like a benevolent act increasingly turns into a more and more menacing journey. The sense of dread about the men's latent frustration and violence is palpable. It's a Kafkaesque trip going nowhere, whilst trains are passing on tracks running parallel to the road. The couple repeatedly try to escape, but every time the van catches up to them and in the desolate country side they are convinced anew to continue with the disagreeable ride. After each interlude, the tension increases and the behaviour of the yobbos becomes more outrageous and ominous.

A capacity to exert power seems to be the central theme here. To start with, the goddesses Kali and Durga are on opposite sides of a spectrum of intentions. Kali is the goddess of death, doom and violence whereas Durga is the goddess who combats evils and demonic forces. On the human plain, these forces play out in different ways. A reciprocal relationship is evident between the men who have attained power and public attention under Kali's spell and the priests who are in charge of the ritual and command authority. Under their control the powerplay has a relatively benign, social effect of awe and veneration for the unseen forces in the universe whilst confirming the male-controlled status. In contrast, power wielded by protagonists away from the religious rituals is one-sided and antagonistic. At the bottom of the patriarchal power hierarchy is the woman, lacking a voice and driven to tears. Her situation is further diminished being a foreigner understanding Hindi only, surrounded by Malayalam speakers. The woman's partner is a captive of her fears about anything unfamiliar. Both are afraid of the lads who run the van. In turn, these are intimidated by corrupt police who randomly stop cars to question drivers and passengers, doing so threateningly and with contempt, dispensing demeaning commentary. The boys in the van are also fearful of their hoodlum bosses. And, there are other members in a pecking order of opportunists ready to exploit the vulnerability of women and strangers. The various power ploys are enhanced by the confusion and irritation caused by different cultural, cast and language backgrounds. Is their intimidating, fear-inducing behaviour an alternative means of trying to attain an altered state of mind, by hook or by crook? Is it about a hidden desire that affects us all to escape ordinary consciousness by drunkenness, drug-induced states or religious ecstasy? Is their bullying an appropriation of Kali's power for their own entertainment? More fundamentally at issue is the paradox of patriarchal worship of idealized feminine qualities, either demonic or favourable, meeting a concurrent, insidious and pervasive disregard of ordinary women who are confined to domestic realms and mostly unseen in society whilst virtually molested if an opportunity arises. It's a dark, topsy-turvy side of India, the complete opposite of the benign, spiritual aspect Westerners romantically have embraced in their quest for a 'higher consciousness'.

A man and a woman find themselves doing the same thing again and again in Sanal Kumar Sasidharan's crime drama, Sexy Durga. What is about to happen or you think might and can happen to them is what is recurring in the real world that the film so hauntingly, and to an extent successfully, reflects. Two characters, both confused and hapless thanks to their circumstance, are forced to seek help from the indifferent society at large to get them from A to B. What they get is what they fear - not policemen who understand the ways of love and internet but four weapon smugglers who have tongues that spew lava and airs that can make you lose control of your bladder. The arresting visuals, be that of men hung from hooks going through their skin or a menacing little van designed like a concert, are enough to make you feel vulnerable throughout the 85 minutes of long, long takes and an overall ominous setting that tells you something bad is about to happen. Sexy Durga, despite losing its three letters, is a remarkable critique of the dangerous and unchanging times we live in. TN.

(As part of the Young Film Critics Lab 2017 at the 19th Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival.)

The movie has nothing, no good story, production, only kept an offensive name and a cover, to offend a certain section of the society and an attempt to generate cheap publicity through controversy.