Cinema is a medium made for spectacular, extraordinary and even grotesque narratives. In contrast, what is striking about Perfect Family, a web series produced by Pankaj Tripathi, and Anusha Rizvi’s film The Great Shamsuddin Family is that they turn their gaze towards a realm often neglected in cinema—the uncelebrated ordinariness of everyday lives, marked by pain, endurance and muted anguish.
In foregrounding this ordinariness, both these works compel us to train our attention to images we tend to unsee and glaze over. In depicting conflict and suffering without theatrical escalation, these works unsettle us with issues we are deeply familiar with. These narratives mirror a social reality we do not always acknowledge, making us realise beautifully how the ordinary, when honestly rendered, can be profoundly disturbing.
Perfect Family exemplifies this aesthetic and ethical choice. Whatever Tripathi’s characters lack in overt theatrical intensity, he allows them to compensate for by showing the rhythms of a life shaped by small accommodations, unspoken contestations and daily negotiations. Gestures and even silences acquire meaning as much as the words uttered. Witnessing the emotional economy of a family that appears functional, even content, one realises that the missed conversations, deferred desires, fragile compromises have quietly fractured it. I was impressed that the revelations in the series were not dramatic, yet the ‘perfection’ of the family is exposed as a social performance sustained through denial. We often mistake endurance for genuine harmony.
Anusha Rizvi’s The Great Shamsuddin Family operates through a similar trope, though its political implications are more explicit. The members of the Shamsuddin family are neither heroic victims nor symbolic constructs designed to elicit easy empathy. They are ordinary, but in the most unsettling sense. I found it unsettling because they endure, adapt and persist without the promise of transformation. Their lives unfold within systems that constrain choice while demanding compliance. Surviving is shown to require a form of labour even when no path towards liberation might be available.
What binds these two works is their refusal to aestheticise suffering or romanticise resilience. Their narratives dwell in a moral grey zone where dignity is negotiated daily. Even ethical clarity is compromised by necessity. The viewer is denied the comfort of catharsis and, as a result, these works compel a more honest engagement with social reality experienced intimately. We are not allowed to leave reassured by redemption or uplifted by spectacle; we are burdened by recognition.
The images these works present are uncomfortably close to home. They mirror lives that resemble our own or those we witness daily without realising. Cramped living rooms, hesitant conversations, humiliation endured are shown as structural features of our society organised around inequality and silence. As the audience, we are called to confront our own complicity in normalising this unequal and unjust order. The discomfort these works generate is the source of their moral force.
In this sense, both works challenge what may be called the politics of visibility in contemporary cinema. Visibility is often mistaken for representation, but representation itself can become another form of erasure when it relies on spectacle or over-simplified exposure. Rizvi and Tripathi seem to be rooting for sustained attention and to be able to resist the impulse to categorise characters neatly as victims or villains. This resistance makes these works significant because they come at a time when films rarely provide an ethical compass in our society, which is paradoxically reeling from deepening polarisation while it’s dangerously fatigued by it.
I also notice that both narratives unfold slowly, refusing the accelerated pacing that dominates films these days. The slow pacing mirrored the lived temporality of waiting—for work, recognition, relief, or change that may perhaps never arrive. This is perhaps what allowed for giving importance to lives that are otherwise dismissed as uneventful, unproductive or inconsequential.
From an analytical perspective, these works can be read through the lens of everyday life theory, according to which the quotidian is a site where power is both reproduced and subtly contested. The ordinary, far from being apolitical, is where social norms are internalised, negotiated and sometimes resisted. In The Great Shamsuddin Family, moments of domestic routine reveal the pressures of communal identity, surveillance and economic precarity. In Perfect Family, rituals of middle-class respectability expose the emotional costs of conformity and repression. These ethically-charged negotiations are, of course, a more accurate depiction of lived realities than moments of dramatic rupture that stories tend to be about.
After watching these works, what lingered was a bit of ache, not some striking image or a line of dialogue. It was the ache of seeing lives reduced to footnotes in national narratives of progress and pride. It was the ache of realising how easily ordinariness becomes a justification for neglect.
Ultimately, Perfect Family and The Great Shamsuddin Family remind us that in an age saturated with noise and spectacle, the most radical act may be to look steadily at what lies before us with full attention. They insist that dignity does not always announce itself, and that injustice often resides not in dramatic cruelty but in routine indifference. In doing so, they reclaim cinema’s ethical vocation, which is not merely to entertain or provoke, but to bear witness and to lead to contemplation.
These works do not ask us to pity their characters; they ask us to consider whether we see our own reflection in their lives. Recognition, unlike sympathy, demands both empathy and accountability. To see these lives clearly is to accept that the ordinary is not outside politics; it is where politics lives most intimately. Rizvi and Tripathi have done a great service by disrupting our habits of seeing, reminding us that what we choose not to acknowledge often defines who we are.
Manoj Kumar Jha | Member of Rajya Sabha and national spokesperson, RJD
(Views are personal)