Ateenage girl does not like her step mother. She throws tantrums, goes for a party, gets kidnapped and is gang-raped inside a moving car. Her step mom—being the epitome of strength and patience that’s expected out of a ‘perfect mom’—takes revenge. That’s the storyline of the Sridevi-starrer, MOM.
It’s not as if we don’t have films that deify motherhood but this one elevates it to the stratosphere by throwing in a mother out to seek blood. And the only way filmmakers could have sold this film was to have an actor with equal measure of powerhouse talent and star value. Perhaps that’s why they chose Sridevi.
The film is all about her superlative performance as the step mother who suffers along with the survivor. It would have made for a strong film, a cinematic masterpiece really, had the filmmakers showcased the reality of rape survival, highlighted where we are going wrong as a people and what needs to be fixed.
There’s no showing of how a survivor and her family copes, the counselling and medical care they need, apathy of the police, medical personnel and lawyers, media exploitation, insensitive and judgemental society. There’s a poignant scene where the survivor scrubs herself raw in the bathroom. Before you could take in the horror of it, you’re hit with Sridevi’s helplessness as the stepmom unable to help her.
It’s such nuanced acting that it squeezes your heart. Any woman with a kid or a sibling she has raised can feel the pain ... almost. But it stops there. Where is the anger? Where are the confrontations between families? What about the impact of a mother’s relationship with her husband or other daughter? Where are her friends and relatives? When a woman is raped, it affects her loved ones too, especially the mother, who is inevitably blamed for not protecting her enough.
Why the filmmakers chose rape is anybody’s guess. Nothing gets people as fired up as the topic of sexual violence, and add the good measure of a vengeful mother figure, it becomes the perfect fodder for commercial cinema. It is also yet another film that redefines how a ‘perfect mother’ should feel and what she is supposed to do.
MOM could have been an ode to a strong mother who not only has to help her kid (step daughter in this film) overcome the trauma but also learn to cope with it herself. MOM could have been all these things and more but it chose mediocrity, and found a veteran actor to sell it.