SHOCK TREATMENT

On a pristine beach, a large door stands by itself. It’s one of the few physical elements of a spare outdoor “house” that demarcates a space where two young women are free to love and to get married around a sacred fire with only a large trident as witness.

If there had been more visual poetry like this surreal, dialogue-less scene in Raj Amit Kumar’s Unfreedom—now available on Netflix, after Indian censors prevented its release in 2015—this could have been a brilliant film. As it stands, the film’s good intentions and earnest performances are stymied by excessive symbolism and on-the-nose dialogue. Even that scene on the beach doesn’t trust the images to make the point. It ends with one of the women telling the camera: “This is our home. A home without walls. Just earth. Water. Fire. Love. It’s actually none of your business to pass judgement.”

Unfreedom cross-cuts between two unrelated stories, in New York and Delhi. In the first, a terrorist, Hussain (Bhanu Uday), tortures a liberal Muslim scholar (Victor Banerjee); in the second, Leela (Preeti Gupta) tries to break free from her controlling father (Adil Hussain) and rebuild life with her former lover (Bhavani Lee).

These narratives examine different forms of intolerance, and the many ways in which people can be caught in a continuum of innocence, complicity and guilt. Oppression and conditioning paint them into corners, leading them into degrees of extremist behaviour: a boy who watched his family massacred goes on to perpetuate a cycle of violence; a woman is so haunted by social expectations that while trying to assert her sexual autonomy, she also insists on marrying her lover (though the latter is reluctant to enter a fullfledged commitment). A victim in one context becomes a criminal in another.

These are worthy themes, but in exploring them Unfreedom often preaches and some of the characters look like caricatures. In the closing sequence, the director uses split screens to connect the dots—right down to showing characters similarly framed or performing similar actions.

The censor board blocked Unfreedom from being released in theatres alleging that its explicit treatment of homosexuality would “ignite unnatural passions”. There is something unsettling about this, as it suggests the board shares the values of the homophobic patriarchs who savagely assault the two lovers in one scene.

There is some discussion of religious fundamentalism, some provocative exchanges (including the “blasphemous” line “What the f— does Allah have to do with this?”) but nothing we haven’t seen in other, subtler films. And there are nude scenes, but here, too, the treatment is heavy-handed: A woman exposed and defenceless, sobbing on the bathroom floor; a bohemian artist sauntering naked through her studio apartment. These clichéd efforts give the impression that Unfreedom is too glossy to do justice to its subject.

—Jai Arjun Singh

THE FILM’S GOOD INTENTIONS AND EARNEST PERFORMANCES ARE STYMIED BY EXCESSIVE SYMBOLISM