Razaa, a short film with long legs

Some films like ‘Dhurandhar’ demand 8 hours to have their say. Others, like this very short film (merely 13 minutes) with long legs, say it all in their pithy playing time.

There is a playful undercurrent to this grim Bergmanesque little nugget.

‘Razaa’, directed by Pooja Tolani and backed by Suresh Triveni (‘Tumhari Sulu’, ‘Jalsa’), could just as well be titled ‘One Evening at the Doctor’s’. It catches a tense mother-daughter at a busy gynaecologist’s clinic.

Geetanjali Kulkarni plays the Muslim matriarch Sabeen, with her teenaged daughter Razaa (Bhumika Sharma).

Kulkarni’s immediate and ineradicable grip over her character’s mounting tension, conveyed in a twitch and sigh, comes as no surprise to anyone who has been watching this astounding actress trapeze from one character to another for an eternity.

The way our myopic industry takes true actors for granted is a subject worthy of an entire thesis.

It is young Bhumika Sharma, Sabeen’s daughter, who is the real surprise of this wonderfully deceptive little drama of dissension.

There is a twist to the tale of a mother-daughter’s temperamental tryst with an urgent medical problem. It’s a twist so thought-provoking and questioning of our mindset on sexual mores and a woman’s right to make her own decisions regarding her body, that I wondered why we need 4 hours to spread malevolence when we can just as well propound empathy in 13 minutes.

And yes, it helps that the two actresses look like mother and daughter. Sharmila Tagore looked nothing like Rituparna Ghosh’s mother in ‘Puratawn’. Neither did Sara Arjun look like Rakesh Bedi’s daughter in ‘Dhurandhar’. But that is another story.