The Wedding Con

“I was well educated, earning decently, fairly good looking,” says one of the women in Tanuja Chandra’s documentaryWedding.con. “And yet…” Yet, she is one of the five women who tell their stories of betrayal in the five episode series on Prime Video. Chandra shot almost 20 hours with each woman, and recreated some parts of their lives to distill that into three hours of what can only be described as harrowing narratives. As each woman talks of being promised love, being cheated emotionally and financially, and being abandoned, it is a tribute to their resilience that they survived to tell their own tales. They did so not merely as therapy but also as warning. Loneliness can be a terrible thing, and added to that is the relentless social pressure on women to get married. As the wedding industry grows more powerful, and the videos, the clothes and the rituals themselves become more complicated, those who get left behind find themselves vulnerable. Chandra shows what happens when such smart women end up making foolish choices, and how society judges them for it. The need for companionship, because “You need someone to witness your life as it happens,” becomes tainted and you could end up losing your life’s savings or worse, sometimes, your life’s purpose. What is amazing is that the women haven’t lost their sense of humour. Chandra says she considers herself a well-informed person and even she was shocked at the scale of the cons, where the youngest victim was 25 and the oldest was 55. What’s love got to do with it? Everything.

The Poet vs the Pugilist

In one of the many social theories that the polarising Hindi blockbuster Animal makes a case for, is the way poets emerged as a rebellion against the rise of the Alpha Male, who was earlier seen as the only attractive mate for women. So it is interesting to see the face-off between poet Javed Akhtar and the pugnacious director of Animal, Sandeep Reddy Vanga. When Akhtar raised an alarm about the popularity of movies such as Animal, Animal’s X feed suggested that Akhtar’s art form is “big false”. Actually, Akhtar, as part of the scriptwriting duo Salim–Javed with Salim Khan, was the originator of the Alpha Male in Indian cinema, a man who would go to great lengths to avenge any indignity visited upon his family, sometimes attacking his “najaayaz” father (as in Trishul, 1978), at other times those who humiliated his father (Deewaar, 1975), and yet again because he felt emotionally abandoned by his father (Shakti, 1982). No filmmaker can say he was not influenced by Amitabh Bachchan’s Alpha Male and his sense of immense hurt which captured the imagination of a generation of moviegoers. But as filmmaker Aditya Kripalani noted recently, all his heroes had to face the consequences of their actions. This new world is one without consequences, he pointed out, and that’s the problem. The truth is perhaps, as Saadat Hasan Manto said so many years ago: “If you cannot bear these stories then the society is unbearable. Who am I to remove the clothes of this society, which itself is naked.” All art forms, good or bad, are products of their times. It is up to society to know what to inhale and what to exhale. Or as Akhtar put it so well, the ball is now in the court of the audience. As he said: “Audiences have to decide what kind of movies should be made, and what kind of films should not be made. Also, what kind of values and moralities should be shown in our films, what should we reject, that decision is in your hands.” This question has paralysed many filmmakers in the industry currently. Their scripts are ready, but they are not sure what audience to make them for, and whether their heroes will appeal to them. This is pretty much a mirror of what is happening in society itself, isn’t it? When brute power is celebrated in intimate relationships as well as in the public domain, what kind of hero does cinema create?

Scene and Heard

Adarsh Gourav has quietly built an impressive international resume for himself while also showing up in some good work at home, most recently in Netflix’s film about social media-obsessed youngsters, Kho Gaye Hum Kahan. As the physical trainer Neil Pereira who cannot seem to appreciate the life he has, Gourav was good. Now the young actor has got a part in Alien, the prequel series to Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). He is also the star of Reema Kagti’s Superman of Malegaon, based on the 2012 documentary of the same name.

Adarsh GouravBollywoodcinemaJaved AkhtarTanuja Chandra