Recently, from the Indian movie "Wrestle, Dad! "The extended feminist discussion has not cooled down. There were "Daughter of India" and "A Country Without Women" before, and then "Crazy Flowers" released this year, all of which brought the social plight of women to the screen and tortured them. All kinds of problems in Indian patriarchal society.
In the past few years, India has begun to resist the awakening of female consciousness in film, literature and art. Women have stepped out of child marriage and become the destined destination of family vassals, and can also find a wider world. Worth watching is the Indian film "Hot", which entered the Toronto Film Festival in 2015.
Many fans came to the large-scale "Hot". Indian actress Radhika Apte appeared naked in the film, but the film itself is very meaningful, showing the ordinary but dark secular society with ordinary individuals, painful but vivid Life has already surpassed the gimmicks of erotic dramas.
The background of the story is set in one of the most backward and poor villages in India. The poetic desert, hidden tattoos, and ancient tents are intertwined into a forgotten picture of the modern era, but in such a remote village, there are gods and beliefs, as well as sin and evil. desire. The film puts the perspective on three ordinary women with different fates, and reflects the microcosm of the lives of women in different moral dilemmas by describing marriage, childbirth, ritual customs and sexuality.
The first woman, Rani, was a widowed mother before the age of 30. She was beautiful, simple, and gentle, but she felt that half of her life had gone to the grave. At the age of 14, she married her husband through traditional marriage. At home, after her husband died unexpectedly, she put on black clothes, carried all the heavy burdens, saved dowry for her unsatisfactory son to marry a daughter-in-law, and raised her elderly and sickly mother-in-law. One day, she suddenly received a wrong call from a man and started a "phone romance"... Rani, who was traditionally educated as a virtuous woman since childhood, began to fall into conflict.
The second woman, La Qiao, is a cheerful, lively and interesting girl. She has been ridiculed by the villagers for a long time because of her infertility, and she was abused by her alcoholic husband when she returned home. La Qiao's hands are fast and nimble, making the most beautiful handmade fabrics, and she is the best female worker in the village, but her husband is furious about it.
And the most charming Bikili in the film, she is extremely beautiful, she is the oiran of a dance troupe, and she runs the business of flesh and blood. She said that men are hypocritical animals. But ran to her account, eager to buy her beauty and body. As her color fades and she begins to be crowded out by younger and more beautiful female dancers, at the same time she falls in love with a handyman who adores her. She longs to escape from her identity and yearns for a peaceful and happy secular marriage.
The "senior association" of men in the village is the epitome of the ruling class in a traditional male-dominated society. They turn a blind eye to the crimes that women encounter. They refuse to let TVs in and women use mobile phones because they are worried that women will watch them. TV, began to "wear jeans", "run away with a lover".
The most painful part of the film is a small clip in which a married woman flees thousands of miles back to her family in the village, but the "Senior Association" sees this as a shameful thing, and the family insists on sending her back. In her husband's house, the woman was forced to tell the story of being gang-raped by all the men at home in front of all the villagers, and her mother was only stunned when she heard it, and still stuffed her back into the truck with a blank expression. In the end, she watched as she was abandoned by the only family who could help her, and was taken back to the hell where she fled desperately.
But the film does not portray all men as heinous bad guys. Kishan, a kind and well-educated villager, hopes to change the situation of female villagers. He and his wife introduce handicraft work, so that women in the village can also have a source of income, buy Books for girls to read. But the villagers despised and ridiculed Kishan's educated wife, who speaks fluent English, just because she "reads books" and "dare to take the bus alone." The pair was finally forced away by violence, representing "bringing civilization Dawn" couple.
And the most despairing thing is that even the woman herself weakly and numbly accepts this terrible idea instilled by the previous generation-a woman is born a sexual partner, a mother, and a wife, but she is not a human being, she cannot have Desire and dissatisfaction, she must have calluses on her hands, and she must have reproductive value. Those who think "Women who have read books are bad wives" and "Women should serve their husbands and families well" are the correct morals. In the face of cheating, domestic violence, and humiliation, they still have to wipe away their tears and smile at them. Brainwash yourself: "Everything will be fine." and go on living, dying, reincarnation.
The society reflected in the film is shockingly backward, and the dilemma revealed by the film, whether it is India or China, is not uncommon for such a cancer-like concept, and even in modern society, there are still many similar problems.
Rani's daughter-in-law shaved off her thick long hair in a fit of rage in order to fight against this undecidable marriage, but nothing changed. It is a typical case of "marriage is a traditional transaction between labor and money" in the feudal society. . Parents just want to marry their daughter away quickly in exchange for a high dowry, without considering their daughter's mood. (The Indian secular stipulation that a man gives a dowry to a woman will only appear when both parties are of low caste.) In modern society, beauty and money are like a scale that will never disappear in the marriage market, no matter how high the status of women is, There are also so-called "marriage experts" who teach women how to please their husbands.
La Qiao's husband is a kind man who pretends to respect the old and love the young outside. When he comes home and closes the door, he is a domestic madman. When he heard that La Qiao made money selling handicrafts, he hated her for disregarding the man's face. The first reaction was to knock over all the food on the table and slap her in the face. In modern society, there are many people who ridicule high-income women. The topic of domestic violence has emerged one after another in recent years. Even in China, there have been frequent occurrences of tragic incidents of domestic violence only resulting in a six-year sentence.
Three uneducated women, under the pressure of worldly shackles, developed self-awareness and began to resist in order to change their predicament. They got into the car that Bikily stole, ran and shouted on the ancient city wall, only at this time, they could speak ill of their goddamn husbands, talk about sex in front of their best friends, and imagine the world outside the village. The film expresses the call for sexual liberation, friendship and conscience in the gray of pain and the brightness of laughter. The most sharp is when dealing with the ending of the four women, it rationally expresses the final concept of the film: only independence Only the self can change the existing destiny.
The movie has no male protagonist and no so-called hero. The kind-hearted Kishan who sees all this clearly is not the male lead, nor is the handyman Raju, who has a deep crush on the prostitute Bickley, nor is the "Shahrukh Khan" who falls in love with Rani on the phone and wants to meet her. Not the male lead. When La Qiao was beaten to death by her husband, there was no hero to save the beauty, no, it was a cruel reality, most of the time, they were alone and helpless. Only with an independent personality, with the dignity and pride of being born, can we dare to challenge the world and face the unknown destiny.
At the end of the story, Peach didn't leave Raju, and Rani didn't plan to meet the lover on the phone. Three 30-year-old women cut their long hair short, which symbolized obedience and motherhood, and cut off the first half of their damned lives. They drove to Mumbai on a motorcycle and chose the life they wanted. From now on, they can Live only for yourself.
Reminds me of the beginning of the movie, when La Qiao sticks his head out of the car window, even if it's only for a moment, he can sigh: "It feels so good to be free."
Since the New Delhi bus rape case in 2015, Indian directors have begun to express their dissatisfaction and resistance to women's experience through the use of film works. Therefore, there have been excellent Indian films that focus on women's perspective and reflect on the unequal status of women. . In "The End of the Road" released this year, the chaotic social flower said on Independence Day: "India is independent, and it doesn't make sense to me because women are not independent."
The highest-grossing Indian film "Baahubali" released this year is a Mahabharata-style classic heroic epic story, but the three main female characters are all sharp women who dare to rebel against patriarchy.
In contrast, in contemporary China, the idea of marrying a good husband and family to change the fate of life, trying to become more beautiful, and getting a higher education just to please high-quality men is still popular. Even TV dramas have high ratings. It is also inseparable from the classic plot of the domineering president saving Cinderella and the ancient goddess competing for the love of the emperor. While we sigh and pity the difficulties of Indian women and the backwardness and ignorance of Indian society, we have never seen that we are also in prison. This generation does not lack glossy and beautiful love stories, but it lacks voices.
We still have a long way to go in Chinese films that speak out for women.
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