Early on in Jayant Digambar Somalkar’s Sthal – four men can be seen discussing a woman’s complexion. “She seems fair, doesn’t she?” one of them asks, only to be shut down by the other: “It is all make-up. Didn’t you notice her elbows? They gave it away.” The woman, actually a young girl named Savita (Nandini Chikte), barely out of her teens, in her final year of college pursuing B.A (Sociology), is being looked at as a prospective bride. Those men could be talking about livestock. Such is the ‘marketplace’ for arranged marriages – especially in India, where such casual indignities are fair game. A bunch of callous traditions reduce the brides’ identities to their responses to a robotic questionnaire like this: “What’s your full name?” “What’s your height?” “What’s your mother’s native?”“What have you studied? Do you work in the field?”They might as well be called ‘recruiting’ a daughter-in-law. Debutante Somalkar mines the scene for all its awkwardness, unintentional humour derived from inane rituals, and observes the transactionality around them. It’s no secret then that during a key scene, a character can be heard haggling for brinjals at a vegetable market while also simultaneously negotiating the dowry he expects from the bride’s father. The scene is chillingly matter-of-fact. Daulatrao Wandhare (Taranath Khitekar) is a cotton farmer in rural Maharashtra. As life goes on in this part of the world, he’s expected to start looking for a match for his daughter, Savita. It’s largely because of the societal pressure to conform to ancient thinking, garbed in concepts like ‘tradition’. Somalkar and editor Abhijit Deshpande bring a nice rhythm to these sequences where the boy’s side comes to Daulatrao’s home. There’s a kind of musicality to the rituals like a bucket of fresh water being kept ready for the guests to wash their hands, feet and face, and a new towel offered to them to wipe themselves. There’s also the small talk in between the chai, poha and supari being offered to the guests. The faux respect among the men is followed by the most disrespectful, condescending tone while ‘interviewing’ the bride.We’ve seen umpteen films on how rigged the system of arranged marriage in India is in the groom’s favour, how Indian society is deeply patriarchal, and yet Somalkar’s film never feels tedious. It’s because of the specificity of the world that Somalkar has chosen – it’s full of rich, tiny observations. Like that throwaway mention of Daulatrao’s academically-disinclined son, Mangya (Suyog Dhawas) and his budding cricket career. Unlike many of his peers, Mangya couldn’t afford to pursue his passion for cricket, and being unfit for a job relegates him to working on his father’s field, watching IPL and betting money in the fantasy cricket league. It’s a time when 4G seems to have reached most villages, but sensibilities have progressed very little since perhaps medieval times. A still from ‘Sthal’.On the flip side, Savita is a dutiful student. She uses the money she gets for to buy books for public service exams, while intermittently being humiliated, as almost a a ritual, each time a prospective groom visits. She’s intellectually curious, and it’s implied by scenes showing her in the college library reading the newspapers. She feels the injustice she’s being subjected to—and slowly forms a vocabulary to articulate herself. Chikte is very impressive as Savita, playing her with a meekness at first, which slowly churns into resolve and ultimately rebellion. However, the highlight of the film is Khitekar – as the father of the prospective bride. He maintains this stooped, stoic body-language throughout the film, almost as if he’s being crushed under the weight of many worlds. Somalkar doesn’t take the easy way out by portraying Daulatrao to be the strict, uncompromising paterfamilias. Instead Khitekar’s face communicates the pain, shame and the relentless injustice he has to endure – as a farmer and also as the father of a girl in a shamelessly patriarchal society. A crucial scene – when he has to tell his daughter to forgo the public service exams because a prospective groom will come to see her – is a masterclass in tenderness, parental concern and insecurity trumping cold logic.Sthal is not the most novel story to emerge out of India, but Somalkar tells it in a measured way. It doesn’t have the forensic gaze of Chaitanya Tamhane or the fluent vigour of Nagraj Manjule – but it won’t be an overstatement to include Somalkar among the wave of interesting Marathi filmmakers in the past decade. It’s visible in the way he sparingly employs score (by Madhav Agarwal and Tamara Kazziha) and slow-motion to heighten the expression of earnest, idealistic puppy love and then disrupts it with real-world choices. Somalkar’s film reminded me of Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen (2020) – indicting the apathy of a society by being a silent observer to injustices hidden in plain sight. Patriarchy is bad. Equality is worth striving for. Many films have preached this, many more will continue to. But it will always be refreshing to see films reflect on how deeply these things are embedded in our most mundane choices and circumstances. *Sthal premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), recently had its India premiere at the 2023 MAMI Mumbai International Film Festival, and is currently playing at the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) 2023.
