QCinema 2024: musings on Santosh, Mistress Dispeller, Cu Li Never Cries

This trio of "reviews" will be pretty informal, as I'm currently putting my energies to something big I'm currently working on.

I suppose it's serendipitous that prior to watching Sandhya Suri's Santosh, I watched two other Indian cop films in theaters: TJ Gnanavel's Vettaiyan, and Rohit Shetty's Singham Again. The latter of the two is unabashedly nationalistic, set in a world where the titular hero's tough cop, impunitive ethos is so baked into the public consciousness that there are now regional Singhams all over India. The former, Vettaiyan, is a film I'd like to compare with Santosh, because the first two films approach the same subject matter in completely opposite ways.

Santosh begins with its titular character (Shahana Goswami) running through the streets in a panic. Her policeman husband has just died. In order to earn herself money and to restore honor to her family, she takes her husband's job and becomes a constable. Soon enough, her ceremonial position is put to the test as she investigates the murder and rape of a young lower caste Dalit girl.

Santosh recognizes the multiple interlinked, intersectional issues that affect cases like this: issues of social status, of caste, of gender. There's an interplay between Santosh's own personal experience and her pursuit of the case: she is mostly dismissed and discriminated against due to her status as a woman, and her pursuit of a Muslim suspect may also bleed into the personal, as her husband was killed in a riot held in a Muslim neighborhood. 

And the film is acutely aware of how the same case is treated in mainstream Bollywood cinema like in Singham Again, where police action is seen as virtuous and something to be emulated, a source of national pride (the final scene even has its Avengers-like team standing on the bow of an aircraft carrier). There are a couple of scenes where Santosh views this idea as fantasy: one where a scene from a Bollywood film is shown on a TV, and another where Santosh looks at a meme where Indian police are seen as bumbling and incompetent compared to Chinese police.

The more Santosh gets immersed into the rhythms of police life, the more she appreciates what (relatively) unfettered power connotes. Her mentor is Sharma (Sunita Rajwar), a senior policewoman who has embraced this culture wholesale. But while Santosh sees justice as the pursuit of truth (and thus, closure), Sharma sees justice as the rest of the police force sees it: as the impression, but not the actual restoration, of social order, and the pretense of a resolution, reached.

Compare this to TJ Gnanavel's Vettaiyan, where an overzealous cop named Athiyan (played by Rajinikanth) pursues a suspect of a brutal rape and murder. Any complexities are smoothed out, even though the film seems to present ambiguities in the case. His "mentor" is Sathyadev Bramhadutt Pande (Amitabh Bachchan), a member of the Human Rights Commission who shows Athiyan what can happen if justice is miscarried. 

Both characters react to this realization in different ways: Athiyan tries to corrects his mistakes by working in the system, while Santosh sees the force as it truly is and shows she has the same integrity as the man she once loved.

***

Filipinos love kabit stories, and during a central confrontation in Elizabeth Lo's Mistress Dispeller, every single person in that theater probably waited with baited breath. But in this documentary that seemed too good to be real, there were no fireworks - only a conversation, albeit tense, between two women who love the same man.

The film does not take any sides in the conflict, opting to stay mostly invisible until certain fourth-wall breaking moments. This invisibility only contributes to how cinematic it all feels, despite being a documentary. The film's tone seems to cross the uncanny valley of reality and fiction because of this, which makes for a subtly unsettling experience.

Even the title invokes something mythic, as if infidelity was some sort of spirit that is created from wayward love, that grows like weeds and dwells in the cracks of a relationship growing stagnant. But instead of banishing these "spirits," people like Miss Wang assuage them, understanding that in the middle of this infidelity are flawed people who made bad decisions out of their loneliness.

***

Near the end of Cu Li Never Cries, Mrs. Nguyen (Minh Chau) heads to the Hòa Bình Dam with a waiter she fancies, who, for appearances' sake, she pretends is her son. She reminisces the times when she took part in the dam's construction. The glow from those historic moments have long faded, and she holds on to the dying embers of those memories. Hòa Bình Dam was once the largest hydroelectric damn in the region, but its record has since been broken.

Time and life both flow inexorably like a river, but like the dam she helped build, Mrs. Nguyen tries to stop its flow, to stem the tides of time and prevent it from moving forward - at first, out of a fear or repeating the past, but ultimately out of a fear of the future, and the idea that it might leave her behind. Her history, and by extension Vietnam's national history, seems to reflect that anxiety towards change. Ideals about love, marriage and society at large are changing, and she sees this in her newly pregnant niece and her well-meaning boyfriend. But at the same time, she worries about the idea that while time goes ever forward, it moves in a circle, with events doomed to repeat themselves.

Throughout its deliberate, languid 93 minutes, Cu Li Never Cries details the slow and arduous process of letting go, not only of the past, not only of deeply held beliefs or anxieties, but also letting go of the fear of what is to come.