The Great Indian Kitchen

After ~3 years of its release, I watched "The Great Indian Kitchen" yesterday. I knew what it was about, yet I was still unprepared for how uncomfortable it was going to make me. I liked a lot of things about this movie. Below is just a list of things I loved about it in particular. There is going to be a huge number of spoilers.

 

Editing:

I dont have that much familiarity with film technicalities. Generally I dont notice most of the things that reviewers are talking about. But I really noticed how fast the movie was moving in the first hour. One of the most important reasons, why I am not watching that many movies now a days, is because of the time it takes for the setup. The makers tend to take their own sweet time, trying to show us all the variables in the movie. More recently, I am reading the book, Ponniyin Selvan, and it is driving me crazy how the crux the plot hasnt even started, even after 23 chapters.

But in this one, the movie wastes no time in the setup. The movie starts with an arranged marriage meeting, and within 10 minutes, shows us the marriage, the initial phases of romance and lands us in the kitchen ( the main arena of the film ). And no detail is omitted. We know what the ambition of the woman is, we are shown that the husband got a dowry in the form of a car.

For every day, we are shown what is being made, who is eating it, and how. Who cleans the house. The nitty gritty details of the work that is going in for every special requirement in the food, and yet all of it moves so fast without missing any details.

One friend of mine once said that "Nolan movies generally have some scenes where the dialogue of the next scene starts before the end of the previous scene, because even after all that his movies takes 3 hours to complete. There is so much to show.". This movie does something similar, there is so much to see and they didnt want to bore us in the process.

Framing:

Most scenes here are static shots. But a lot of those shots, tell a story themselves. I especially loved 2 shots. 

 

One where the women of the house are shown to be cleaning the gigantic house in the background and the father in law sleeping in the foreground. The shot lasts for a mere 5 seconds, and the change of focus between these two, tells what we need to understand about the scene.

The other scene comes near the end, where the female protagonist is walking away from the home, and we are being shown the state of the rest of the village in a side angle running shot. This particular woman has found a way to free herself, but the women in the rest of the households, are still stuck in the same situation, and also manages to show a bunch of women protesting against the very judgement that is trying to provide them the rights they are being denied.

 

Visual story telling: 

I am a sucker for visual story telling, be it games or films. This film knocks this one out of the park.

The way we are being force to notice the monotonic nature of the life of the woman.  "Show, don't tell" is one of my favorite guiding factors when I have to decide how good a movie is. This movie just takes it to the extreme in the first hour.

 

All the struggles that the woman is going through is shown, without much dialogue directly addressing them.  Being from a similar household myself, I could easily predict what the other conflicts are going to be ( like handwashing clothes ). The repeated shots of the sink, filled to the brim is painful to watch, especially because I have started cooking recently. The mess that is being created when men eat or cook, and the complete lack of acknowledgement of it. Most of these is not mentioned in dialogue anywhere.

Dialogue

This one uses very little dialogue to move the story, but the ones it chooses to use are so dense with subtext, it makes the information theory nerd in me, jump in happiness. Some of my favorite moments are, when the FIL casually says "your job is more important than the bureaucrats and ministers out there". I am sure everyone who was in this situation has heard that line, and they understand clearly what that means.

Another one is the dialogue where the girl's mother says "you should be grateful for having the chance to be in such a household". Every single one of them is used precisely to deliver the most impact possible. I don't remember seeing such efficient film-making anywhere else.

Even apart from all this, the movie just smashes it in other parts. Inclusion of the issue of Supreme court judgement about women entry into Sabarimala temples, is a masterpiece. This reminds me that, I am yet to see even a single non-toxic Sabarimala Aiyappan devotee in my life, and I count 7 of those people. The movie made me squirm throughout the entire length of the movie. The decision to make the male characters not obviously evil, is also brilliant, as most of us don't even realize the terrible things we do in our own houses. In conclusion, like blue satta maaran said in his review for the Tamil version of this movie, This movie is a reminder to every woman to run away, as fast as possible, if they find that an alliance is from an overly orthodox Hindu family.