The unlikely heroes

Shardul Bhardwaj

In Aneek Chaudhuri’s words, his film White (which screened at the Cannes Market Screening, 2018) is a silent film which “tells stories of three women surviving rape and fighting back to lead a normal life”. Calling the rapists “perverts,” he chooses to “focus on the heroes of the film i.e. the three women who fought back rape and lead normal lives.” 

This statement, in the first instance, should have nothing odd about it except when one chooses to delve further into the figure of mere ‘pervert’ or the figure of ‘heroes’. The rapist is not a mere ‘pervert’ to start with. He is part of a society, which is pervert. Psychopaths are not created in isolation. Societal conditioning helps us the middle class to distance ourselves from rapists and be able to divert the blame on the perpetrator. To look at the rapist in a creative work in this way can easily be termed sympathising with the rapist rather it merely helps a work to start exploring the interiority of its subjects.

Chaudhuri tries to explore the interiority or the mind of the three women. Can the interior exist without the exterior, which  in this case is the the rapist and the socio political scenario these women are placed in. There is an attempt to hint at it with the shots of the city bustling right in front of  the balcony of a girl, who returns to her house from an orphanage after two decades. Largely the film stays inside closed rooms of its protagonists and tries to build upon by fragmenting the space of the room and overlapping with montages of articles in the room.

Chaudhuri and his sound designer Siddartha Chaterjee have put in mood music in these domestic spaces. Thus, one can see the woman struggling to do daily chores at an advanced stage of pregnancy with a flute directing the audience’s senses to look at the plight of the woman. According to Chaudhuri, it is music that depicts the hope and triumph of these characters. In the first story, Chaudhuri has used diegetic sounds of the factory.

The mood music, which has been used to increase pathos in the domestic spaces, stands in opposition to the beautiful storytelling through the sounds in factory. It could have been an interesting proposition to have explored the sound of wind filtering through the window and the small table fan whirring away as the laborious simple daily chores are carried out by the pregnant woman. This brings us to another question: Is this a silent film?

There are interesting aspects of the film, too, like the husband accepting the child of his wife, who has been raped. 

White aims to concentrate on the ‘power of womanhood and it portrays how women can survive the most terrible situations and brave them’. With the  elimination of language, the film attempts to talk to a global audience.