Now, I want a man who moves on

If you have a couple of hours of indulgence due and want to feel warm and fuzzy, I recommend you watch the Trisha Krishnan-Vijay Sethupathi starrer 96.
Now, I want a man who moves on

If you have a couple of hours of indulgence due and want to feel warm and fuzzy, I recommend you watch the Trisha Krishnan-Vijay Sethupathi starrer 96. If you have already seen the film, you know why 96 is that rare film that leaves you teary and tapping into memories and emotions that you thought far gone and a film that stays with you long after you have left the theatre.

There is much that I can mention about this film that is essentially a tale of unrequited love told beautifully through teenagers in love and adults who meet two decades later at a school reunion. But most of what I wish to talk about is the ways in which the film smashes the idea of toxic masculinity that is otherwise protected by the ‘cinema brotherhood’. But before I get into that: Toxic masculinity as defined by Geekfeminism and Wikipedia refer to stereotypically masculine gender roles that restrict the kinds of emotions allowable for boys and men to express, including social expectations that men seek to be dominant, violent, unemotional, sexually aggressive, and so forth. Film to me is more than the few hours of sitting in front of the screen — it is the way in which it is constructed, advertised, sold, experienced, and all the people who are involved all the way— and as it affects many lives I don’t see it as a merely two dimensional medium.

Coming back to the multiple ways in which 96 breaks out of cinema’s toxic masculine patterns: 1. Simple as it may seem, but a massive shift is that both the lead actors’ names appear together on screen. In the male hero celebrating, hardly heroine-worshiping for her acting world, this is a way of respecting both actors for their skill and seniority. 2. I don’t remember Ram, Vijay Sethupathi’s character in film crying but the vulnerability and loneliness that is exposed speaks both of a well-written character, and an actor, not a mass hero wanting to push himself further with each role. Thala Ajith and Thalapathy Vijay crying as policemen, fathers and husbands pale in comparison because the actor never really took over from the hero in these movies and so, kudos to the team of 96 for casting right. 3. A shy teenager who faints at the thought of talking to his crush grows up to be a shy, private alert — in neither apologising for the introvert that he is, nor suggesting that there might be a reason for this behaviour, the film normalises ‘non-masculine’ behaviour in men, turning toxic masculinity on its head.

In cinema, since the talkies we have seen a great number of men on screen, but so few ways in which they react to lost love. There is the man who wallows in self-pity, setting himself on a self-destructive pathway, drinking himself to death, or attempting to kill himself unable to live with the failure of his love. The man with the TASMAC song, bad- mouthing the very woman he claims to love and then all women in general has become the norm of the recent years.

Sometimes we see the man who pursues the woman after she has rejected his proposal, teasing, stalking, and coercing a ‘yes’ out of her, rarely the one who wants revenge, and commonly the sacrificial man who ‘wants to see the woman he loves happy’. And then in 96, we have the man who is none of the above — he has his own life, a successful career, a carefully curated home, nostalgia, fond memories, and no spite — but, he is a man who has not moved on, retains sadness and regret with all else. And somehow even in this non-masculine setting, the hero becomes the one who is rooted to the pain and misery of the woman who has suffered just as much is dismissed because she did what she had to do — marry, make babies and live her life out. While this is almost a first in film for a man like this, it makes me yearn for another kind of man as well — the man who moves on, is happy with someone else, and if not, like Trisha’s Jaanu in the film, content at the very least.

Archanaa Seker

seker.archanaa@gmail.com

The writer is a city-based activist, in-your-face feminist and a media glutton

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