Guilty questions status quo

Puts its audience on the spot and asks them these pertinent questions. It holds a mirror that despite all the big talk, our ‘opinionated’ generation doesn’t hold a great opinion when it comes to judging a girl.

Thirty one years ago in Jonathan Kaplan’s The Accused, Jodie Foster played a girl who is gang-raped because ‘she asked for it.’

Now it’s debutant Akansha Ranjan, impressively in-character, playing a campus libertine from Jharkhand who comes on too strongly with our rape-accused hero the popular Vijay Pratap Singh (Gurfateh Singh Pirzada) during a rock concert that rocks the gender boat violently. Did the aggressively in-your-face Tanu “ask for it”?

Director Ruchi Narain, returning to feature-film direction after 2005’s interesting but fractured Kal, Yesterday & Tomorrow, offers no easy solutions, as there are none. That a rape has indeed been committed is unclear until the devastating finale where, during a love concert, we finally get to know the truth because of an eyewitness. Luckily it was a male. Because, as Kiara’s traumatised character Nanki points out, if a woman said she saw a woman being sexually violated, no one would believe her.

There are times in this gripping gritty whodunit when Narain’s grip over the reality of a vast assortment of characters groping in the dark, seems to loosen. Perhaps the screenplay which Narain co-wrote with Atika Chouhan and Kanika Dhillon needed to focus more on the central conflict rather than allow so many extraneous perceptions to seep into a septic situation.

I also felt the quest to simulate suspense is slightly self-conscious. Did he do it? Is she lying? The viewers are seduced into an investigative drama with Shabbir as the accused defence lawyer Dalip Tahil’s assistant, playing almost the traditional detective’s role. For a film that shows such a high level of commitment to a cause, the cinematic embellishments ought to have been minimised.

Some from the torrent of characters, like the rapeaccused’s ‘privileged, empowered’ parents, appear to be stereotypical characters. Narain largely avoids predictable options and doesn’t shy away from the uglier aspects of the situation. Interestingly the protagonist is neither the rape victim nor the alleged rapist but his girlfriend who, by dint of being a woman and close to the perpetrator, open up an entire vista of discussions in the plot.

Kiara is just about successful in shouldering the responsibility. But on the positive side, something worthwhile has emerged from the MeToo movement. Otherwise, as the director points at the end, the accused have gone back to their work. It’s business as usual for women. Groping in the dark.