I cannot remember if I was ever consciously grateful to over-the-top media platforms. I certainly am after watching Amala Paul’s Aadai last night and it’s only because these platforms come with a ten/fifteen second fast forward option. Aadai released to much fanfare and many a review but I must be honest in accepting that I only finished the movie because such an option existed for me. The nude scenes were excruciatingly long, sometimes unbearable, otherwise triggering. Generally, I would not comment on a film that’s considered ‘important’ but as this one touts itself to be a feminist film I feel compelled.
First, there is Amala Paul’s character and lead of the film, Suthanthirakodi aka Kamini, the only self-proclaimed feminist in the film. While feminists can be many people and many things, it is thankfully today’s thumb rule at least on paper, that if it’s not intersectional, it’s not feminism. Amala Paul’s character doesn’t seem to give it any thought. Instead she becomes the vehicle through which feminism is misrepresented.
There are daring, bold, adventurous people and they may or may not be feminists — those who are feminists don’t use these characteristics to trample over people or break rules, or they don’t have to do this to be ‘feminists’. Then there is the independence in a feminist, the biggest stereotype if there is one, and only worsened on Tamil screen because independence is equated to insensitivity.
The other thing is about solidarity and sisterhood, and saving and lifting each other — all the things feminists try to do. Kamini locks her friend up in a bathroom for selfish reasons and stands laughing as her friend receives an earful from the boss. When Kamini asks her mother in the movie, “Tell me what feminism is?”, I wish the mother had asked her back — the answer could’ve decided if I wanted to go through with the rest of the film or not.
But that was closer to the beginning of the film and that did not happen. Somewhere it became clear that Kamini herself had a half-baked idea of feminism, or the director for her — the love, sex, drugs being another boring stereotype — and turning down a proposal had in it the potential to normalise friendship, but it quickly slid down to a supposedly-funny-actually-not embarrassment of the man who ‘dared’ to ask this feminist woman out. Towards the film’s end, Kamini is covered with a tape that reads ‘Do Not Enter’. It might as well have read ‘Stereotype’.
The film cannot be feminist because the lead claims to be one. And only she does. Yes, this one passes many popular western feminist film tests including the Bechdel, Sexy Lamp, etc, but still fails its own premise with the shaming that happens at the end. If the undressing was a metaphor to be devoid of privilege it doesn’t come through obviously. And a feminist film in an Indian context needed to have given screen time and space, dialogue and a narrative arc to the Bahujan woman. A deeper critique of caste is evaded and we are left with violence, shame, a moral lecture — of course, the lecture would’ve never been possible under more civil circumstances because of the privileges that separate Kamini and Nangeli. But the film fails the feminism it claims to bear the torch of, even while taking on sexual harassment at its very end.
There is no feminist creation Bible which says that feminists should be written like this; in a world filled with bad, guilty, hot, radical, liberal, Dalit, intersectional feminisms, I wonder why creators are so eager to box themselves into stereotypes. An Aadai is important, but it’s only the bare minimum.