What Maharaja Gets Wrong, & Iratta Right

What Maharaja Gets Wrong, And Iratta Gets Right

The Vijay Sethupathi-starrer and Joju George film both have troubling ideas of sexual violence, but the latter still manages to be more empathetic, writes Neelima Menon

The following essay contains references to sexual assault and suicide. Reader discretion is advised.

MAHARAJA (Vijay Sethupathy), a stoic man with a bandaged ear, enters a police station to file an FIR for theft. When the shocked cop realises that the stolen object is an iron dustbin, he slaps the beleaguered Maharaja in a fit of anger. But nothing seems to faze Maharaja as he frantically hangs on to a ledge, ignoring the slaps, pleading with the cop to help him. Ironically, the mayhem and convoluted narrative twists that follow are antithetical to what the film is trying to achieve.

If its premise was to be condensed in a single line, Maharaja is about a man out to hunt down his daughter’s rapists. However, the film resorts to narrative gimmicks and extra-textual factors, resulting in diluting the emotional heft of the plot. So you have various plot points that intersect with the central arc — there is a bad guy and a good guy who have crossed paths at one stage in their lives, and two dads who carry untold traumas from their past to the present. And, as is often seen, rape is used as a narrative device to disseminate a good man versus evil man story.

Ever since his wife died, Maharaja’s world revolves around his teenage daughter. The only time he displays any emotion is when it concerns his daughter. Earlier in the film, you witness a mirror of the police station incident in her school when she is falsely accused of misconduct by the principal. At other times, at the police station where he has filed the FIR, he mutely puts up with the ill-treatment of the cops who make him run errands and slap him for a tiny slip-up. The depiction of police violence is crude and insensitive, which is unsuccessfully masked under humour.

While the red herrings in the film are interestingly placed, where Maharaja falters is in how the sexual violence of the minor is depicted. If the dialogues are unsettling, the graphic violence can turn your tummy. The default depiction of sexual violence on screen is through a voyeuristic lens, regulated by the male gaze. Hardly surprising as it’s mostly men behind the camera, who are taking references from each other’s films. Only female film critics found it important to underline the execution in Maharaja as problematic. What purpose do such lengthy scenes of sexual assault in cinema serve other than cater to the male gaze? You can easily convey the trauma and horror through dialogues or metaphor, as Priyamani did in Raavanan or Sai Pallavi depicted in Love Story (watch with an OTTplay Premium subscription).

In the hospital, the battered survivor later tells her father that she wants to see her predators and ask them why they did it. That’s what happens when male writers — in their eagerness to provide agency and individuality to female characters — screw up at a basic level. That’s what propels you to think that a teenage girl, still recovering in the hospital bed after being brutally assaulted, wanting to meet her predators, makes for an empowering statement. Irrespective of age, gender or orientation, the trauma can leave you shattered, helpless, scared. Survivors need time, safety and trust to heal and move on with life. And that is perfectly normal.

ALSO READ: The Vijay Sethupathi Interview | 'Cinema Is Not What One Person Does'

But in Maharaja, director Nithilan Swaminathan (also the writer), in his haste to sound radical, fails miserably in empathising with his character. Would the course of the narrative be altered if they removed the graphic scenes of assault and allowed the girl to heal, instead of pushing her to make such far-fetched declarations? For a viewer like me, who avoids such films as they create traumatic after-effects, it would have been easier to invest in the emotional upheavals of the characters. You don’t need to show graphic violence to empathise with a survivor's plight. Not showing anything explicit won’t weaken the impact.

Also, some of the most crucial moments of emotional conflicts in the film fail to move you. And here the attempts to humanise the antagonist (Anurag Kashyap) in those finale scenes leave a bitter aftertaste as his crimes don’t validate any empathy. Maharaja’s character sketch in hindsight lacks depth, or rather appeared too stoic, therefore his actions and reactions are too clinical for us to invest in his story.

Another disturbing subtext in the film is how rape is addressed only because the survivor is linked to the leading man, when it should be made loud and clear that any act of sexual violence against any human has equal gravitas. That was what was also what went wrong with Iratta, which otherwise got a lot of things right.

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Iratta begins with the murder of ASI Vinod Kumar (Joju George), the twin brother of DYSP Pramod Kumar. Once Pramod takes over the investigation, it emerges that Vinod killed himself out of guilt for raping his niece years ago. Pramod has been estranged from his spouse for some years owing to his anger issues. The twins hail from a broken home. If Vinod grew up with his abusive father who used to molest young girls, Pramod was brought up by his mother. The brothers have never seen eye-to-eye on any issues.

Although Iratta stays away from showing graphic visuals of sexual violence, it still aligns with Maharaja when it comes to grappling with the moral complexities of the crime. The rape goes unreported and is only disclosed following Pramod’s investigation. Further, the crime inflicted on the young woman gets any consequence only when her relationship with the predator is unveiled. Till then the narrative stays away from empathising with her trauma or that of her family. Instead, a large part of the narrative is spent humanising Vinod who seeks redemption in a new relationship. Even in his first interaction with his love interest Malini, Vinod’s initial intention is to proposition her. Surprisingly, he falls in line when she resists. Soon a romance blossoms between them, leading to happy domesticity. In hindsight, these are manipulative strategies to soften our perception Vinod, who has a history of raping women in the narrative.

ALSO READ | The OTTplay Guide To Joju George's Essential Filmography

Despite such writing lapses, Iratta succeeds where Maharaja fails — it breaks our hearts, sinking us into depths of despair, as we reflect on the greyness of humanity. In a single shot of human error that’s also inadvertently linked to their scarred past, so many lives are wrecked. Vinod and Pramod never really recover from their battered childhood — the ghosts of their past haunt them all through their lives. It influences all their relationships.

If Vinod carries vestiges of his abusive father’s genes, so does Pramod — although he channelises these in other ways. Ironically, Vinod’s death signals the collapse of his twin’s existence as well. There is an eeriness and grief in that penultimate scene when a distraught Pramod stares at his reflection, as the truth sinks in. While one concedes that the survivor’s trauma is cruelly downplayed, Iratta still ends up being a devastatingly haunting experience.

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