Now streaming: Women’s stories told by women
While the beginning of the pandemic was all about doom scrolling, trying to get a fix on working from home and learning how to cook for myself, it began to lend itself to some serious bingewatching. If I look back, I watched some really wonderful series about women, made by women.
It began with Unorthodox, about a girl’s frustration in her traditional community and her courage in running away to find a new life for herself. I saw Run, about a woman running away with her ex-lover, even if just for a while. I May Destroy You, with its fresh exploration of what it is to be a young black woman in London, dealing with life after a sexual assault, was perhaps, for me, the show of the year. And then I saw the brilliant Mrs America, about the battles within the feminist movement in the 1970s. I also saw the adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, exploring the vagaries of youth and complicated relationships.
And then there was The
Undoing. Another brilliant study of a woman forced to see the truth about her husband. Watching all these shows made me think of the opportunity streaming platforms provides to tell more nuanced stories about women. From the female point of view. With a clearly female gaze. An opportunity the theatrical space in India did not provide because it was prohibitive towards newer voices. Especially newer female voices.
Can we finally move away from the male heterosexual cisgender privileged upper caste hero, to stories about other humans? Putting at the centerstage the lives of women, stories from and about the LGBTQI, stories by and about Dalit characters. That is the crucial question.
One hopes that if audiences become more open to a variety of stories in streaming, they will be more open to those stories in the theatrical space as well. And filmmakers, who find streaming more freeing, can carry that sense of abandon into the stories they tell for the theatrical space.
Two films that I watched that broke my heart: Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always, about a teenage girl’s journey to get an abortion, and Pieces of A Woman, about a woman dealing with the loss of a child immediately after birth. Both are about uniquely female experiences. I was so taken by their quietness, their depth and beauty. I hope there is space for films like that in India, where one can explore what it means to be a woman, without having to embellish it with inauthentic elements, just to make it palatable for the “market.”
One hopes that if audiences become more open to a variety of stories in streaming, they’ll also be more open to those stories in theatrical space. ALANKRITA SHRIVASTAVA,
Director