Wonder Women and Anjali Menon’s Unmaking of Her Own Art

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I happened to watch the new Anjali Menon movie ‘Wonder Women’ (2022), and the following are my thoughts. Unfortunately, most of them are negative. I felt it was a badly made movie. Anyway, I didn't have a lot of expectations from her as a director as my interest in her movies had declined since she turned into a commercial filmmaker. However, just less than a couple of minutes into the movie, the face of Nithya Menen cheered me up as she is an individual I like a lot in Malayalam cinema. But then again, barely two or three minutes more and I could smell disaster. That’s when Nandita speaks to Veni and her mother-in-law.

The flaws:

Nandita (Nadiya Moidu) is this lady running a preparative centre called 'Sumana' for pregnant women. She educates them on the subject and makes them practice yoga and various exercises for a few days during the gestation period to prepare them mentally and physically for easy and safe delivery and healthy motherhood. And what we see at the beginning of the movie is the first day of six pregnant ladies from different backgrounds arriving at Sumana to join the program. Nandita is mature, understanding, inspiring, accommodating, solves issues diplomatically, pumps enormous amounts of energy and confidence into her clients to help them overcome their fears, and exudes positivity. In short, she possesses all qualities it takes to become popular among people and a winner in her profession and life. That’s why her words to Veni (Padmapriya) and her mother-in-law looked totally out of place. Veni is visiting Nandita for the first session like the other five members in the fresh batch, and she has her mother-in-law with her. The conversation goes like this:

Veni: “Is it okay if my mother-in-law also joins the class?”

Nandita: “As you can see, this is a class for pregnant women. Of course, if your mother-in-law is pregnant, sure, why not?”

Veni: “No, I mean that…”

Mother-in-law: “I am her bystander.”

Nandita: “If you’re a bystander, you can stand outside. I can call you when the class is over.”

The words of Nandita look impertinent, and hence very unlike her character when you consider her qualities mentioned earlier which she displays throughout the movie. Or is it sounding rude only to me?

This was just the beginning. You can see more trouble with the making of the film as it progresses. Hardly a couple of minutes further you can see a squabble among the pregnant women over the language of instruction for the classes. On one side are three South Indians, Nora (Nithya Menen), Veni (Padmapriya), and Saya (Sayanora), and on the other side, the North Indian Jaya (Amruta Subhash). The North Indian is a minority among others as the story takes place in the South. She cannot understand Malayalam or English and asks if the instructions could be in Hindi. Immediately, the three women on the other side start the fight with her. They close in on her who appears helpless, and behave in a manner uncivilized people do. The three women all have wide exposure living in big cities and places like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Coimbatore, Goa…, and have a cosmopolitan air about them, but behave in a totally unrefined fashion as if they are some uneducated folk from very remote and backward villages. Perhaps the director wants to include the topic of the alleged Hindi imposition on the South by the North in the movie. But it looks entirely out of place. It's not that such a North-South fight cannot occur in real life, but if it does happen with such characters as in the movie, it would undoubtedly appear in a different fashion than presented. And ironically, despite the purportedly fervent fight to defend South India, all converse in English, a non-South Indian language, throughout the film!

Why so many flaws?

I guess such flaws appear because Anjali Menon uses her film as a vehicle to carry certain ideas she feels are important to the viewers. However, she doesn’t seem to be concerned about how it all affects the film's health. It's not only with issues of interest to the mass viewers but also about certain matters that apparently she considers important to her personally or even she is merely obsessed with. I guess she has a predilection for hippie ideology. You can see so many hippie/peace symbols and motifs scattered randomly in her films. In ‘Wonder Women’, I spotted it in at least three places. Remember, these three ‘hippie instances’ are not about one person. Each of these is about a different person. In one scene, you see Nora wearing a t-shirt sporting the hippie logo. And another person in the group has the same logo as her profile picture on WhatsApp. Furthermore, Nandita has a leather bracelet again with the same logo; and it was presented to her by a boy barely in his teens. Is he also a hippie philosopher? How come half of the people in the movie who come from diverse backgrounds are hippies by chance? That too, including a little boy who must be having no idea what the logo is all about. What proportion of people in Kerala have you seen in real life sporting such bracelets and symbols? It all looks so unrealistic. If a foreigner watches the movie, they might think that in Kerala the hippie movement of the sixties and the seventies is still very active.

When I watched Anjali’s earlier film ‘Koode’ (2018), I had thought she was having the hippie representation in her movies to her heart’s content because there is a Volkswagen ‘hippie wan’ throughout it. It is even like a character in the film. I mean, she used it so much in the movie that she wouldn’t need hippie symbolisms anymore in any of her creations. But I was mistaken and she seems insatiable in this regard. If there is so much hippie passion in her, I sincerely wish she makes a movie entirely focused on the hippie theme. She can have her favorite actors like Dulquer, Parvathy, Nithya, Nazriya, etc. as hippies in it. She will be able to use all of her bohemian repertoire in such a film, and it would look better than having to insert such themes in incongruous places. Only, I hope it will not look like a repetition of ‘Charlie’ (2015).

Another apparent preoccupation of Anjali is some elderly Muslim person with pure love and adoration for their grandchild. In 'Ustad Hotel' (2012) (which was her screenplay), there is this grandfather with a Sufi heart full of love for the Muslim protagonist. Again in 'Wonder Women', the grandmother of one of the women Mini (Parvathy Thiruvothu) comes to meet her towards the end of the film with unadulterated affection and fondness. There is nothing wrong with such scenes, but such tropes look repetitive. Also, they often look like redundant bits that don’t go well with the overall framework. Having to revisit the same themes also makes the viewer suspicious of the scope of the director’s art and wonder if they don’t have anything new to show. I guess, being connected to Kozhikode, a district with a higher Muslim population than most districts in Kerala, she must be like a certain friend of mine who is very sentimental and nostalgic about anything Muslim, though he is a non-Muslim. He had his schooling in a Muslim-managed institution and hence must have had many good Muslim friends in his childhood. His face lights up hearing the azan, the Islamic call to prayer, or when he sees someone sporting a Muslim religious cap or speaking some word exclusive to the Muslim community.

Anjali Menon also includes in her films elements that are trendy, especially among youngsters, which often means immature ideas or ideas in their immature forms. It is clear that it is done to ensure the commercial success of the films. Is commercial success wrong? No. Many films of great artistic value are commercially successful too. That's unquestionably attributable to the inclusion of elements that help them make a commercial impact. However, with Anjali Menon, you can very well see that she is not adept at it. Successful filmmakers add commercially promising elements to their films without diminishing their artistic appeal or technical quality. However, when Anjali does it, it really affects the films badly and you see sharp edges of such extra insertions jutting out. The more she does it, the more it shows. She is no more a new film director; since we have at least five films to her credit as director, a comprehensive evaluation of her work is not impossible anymore.

The overall appearance of the film:

So much about the various unnecessary elements she has used wrongly or in the wrong places in the movie. Apart from that, even the overall appearance of the film itself is not that appealing. It doesn’t have a good plot or an interesting progression or twists emanating therefrom or an exciting ending. All that is different and useful within its framework is that it seeks to provide awareness of the intricacies of pregnancy to the viewers, especially husbands of pregnant women, and also attempts to educate women about their rights concerning labour and how to go through gestation and delivery in a healthy way. It specifically points out the rights of a pregnant woman to have a birth companion in the labour room and choose a comfortable birthing position which does not necessarily have to be the usual lithotomy one. However, all that could also be done by making a documentary. In fact, the director’s initial intention was to make a documentary, but then the plan changed and it became a feature film. I guess it has affected the film a lot. What we see is something like a documentary presented in the form of a feature film. Hence, it does justice neither to the feature film form nor to the documentary form. Anjali Menon seems to have had gotten stuck in limbo between the two. It explains why the plot has no notable developments and a proper climax emerging from it as in a usual feature film and why it is so short (one hour and twenty minutes) contrary to the standard followed by Malayalam movies. I guess if it were a bit longer, there would have been enough room for interesting plot developments and even appropriate spaces to insert the ‘extra’ elements mentioned earlier.

On the best of Anjali Menon’s art:

To me, her best movie is ‘Manjadikkuru’, which was released in theatres in 2012. It’s not merely her best; I’m sure even many of the successful directors in the Malayalam film industry today would fail in bringing forth something like it. Anjali Menon is indeed a gifted, brilliant director. ‘Manjadikkuru’ was an excellent creation because it was purely done for its art with seemingly no commercial aims, and Anjali Menon is at her best when she does that. Even her ‘Happy Journey’, one of the short films in the anthology ‘Kerala Café’ (2009) curated by Ranjith and her first creation to be viewed in theatres, was a little gem. She rightly deserved the appreciation received for the simple yet stimulating plot that would keep you on the edge of your seat. Her astuteness in giving form to a compelling story within the timeframe of a mere few minutes is indeed an exceptional achievement. To be honest, this short film too is not entirely free from the insertion of peculiar motifs typical of her. However, since it was her very first creation for cinema, one couldn’t look at it that way as there was nothing to compare it with. I remember reading her words on how she conceived ‘Happy Journey’. Ranjith had called a preliminary meeting of all directors who would contribute to the anthology. And he pointed to Anjali Menon before anyone else and asked her to present her story. She was dumbstruck for a moment because she did not have a story ready at hand. She was expecting the meeting to be a casual one merely for everyone to get to know each other and thought that serious discussions would follow in further meetings. She was mistaken and embarrassed as a newcomer in the industry. However, she managed to conjure up a story from nowhere extempore, which assumed the shape of what we see as ‘Happy Journey’ now. She had said following its success that stories were all around you if you only looked.

What’s good about the movie:

What I loved most in ‘Wonder Women’ is Veni’s intervention at the hospital when Jaya is taken for delivery. She talks about statutes and the LaQshya Guidelines to fight for Jaya’s right to have a person accompany her to the labour room as a birth companion. I’ve never been able to not admire such characters in real life nor look at them without respect. Unfortunately, there are not many of them around. They avoid unnecessary talk that takes you nowhere and use facts instead. Only by understanding and acknowledging facts can you really solve any issue and tread the path to progress. Because finally, that's what makes sense amid all the sound and fury signifying nothing. Even in this film, that’s what made sense finally in the commotion created by the heated recriminations between two groups. Even the pregnant women’s trainer Nandita was not aware of the law (which is another flaw in her characterization). Being an instructor training pregnant women to be proud of themselves and be aware of their rights, she ought to know the relevant legal fundamentals. Instead, she is seen helpless and desperate, almost crying like a baby along with others when the hospital staff refuses entry for a bystander into the labour room. That’s representative of our level of ignorance in all spheres. People have achieved literacy, but legal literacy is also essential, which we have not even started talking about yet. It’s a country that’s the largest democracy in the world with an expansive body of law and yet the level of legal awareness is such that most people are apparently unsure even about something as silly as which side of the road to drive on. It's also interesting to note that, ironically, in the labour room scene, it's the same Nandita who refused Veni her bystander mother-in-law at the training centre that's fighting now for Jaya's right to have a bystander!

The actresses in the leading roles are Archana Padmini, Nithya Menen, Sayanora Philip, Amruta Subhash, Padmapriya, and Parvathy Thiruvothu as pregnant women and Nadiya Moidu as Nandita. Then there are their husbands and family members and other characters. All have played their roles mostly well. And one must congratulate Anjali Menon for selecting a unique theme for her film, but she could have done it a lot better.

To sum it up, this looks like a very insincere filmmaking attempt from Anjali Menon and I get the strong feeling that she is unmaking her art herself through her films bit by bit, step by step. Deeply yearning for another ‘Manjadikkuru’ from her, perhaps in the form of a vibrant hippie movie.

(Image courtesy: TellyChakkar.com)