96 C. S. BHAGYA
each other, over the course of the film, shed their reservations about the other in hollow gestures of support. Suranjana, directed by Nargis about her daughter’ s needs, returning a favour, coolly drops the factory construction over one perfunctory phone call to her corporate associates. Moreover, Suranjana’ s portrayal as a ruthless corporate executive whose professional aggression appears to materialise at the cost of distinctive feminine traits of nurture already treads precarious ground with a subtext mandating women to be successful caregivers to children regardless of contextual factors and thereby reinforces stereotypical beliefs about femininity.
Mad and Pam’ s heartfelt tête-à-tête had the potential to be a truly touching exercise of trust and bonding, if it had not been just one instance in a litany of laments that each of the protagonists necessarily has to embody in order to construct them as a deserving, beleaguered people worthy of operating as a metaphor for women everywhere. Mad’ s troubles with her profession, when compared to Pam’ s problems with her conservative family and husband, or to Suranjana’ s negotiations with the land dispute and motherhood, or Lakshmi’ s struggles with her brother’ s killers marked by her class status, or Frieda’ s alienation after coming out, are each constituted of radically different social and cultural substances. Even if they do share some similarity on the basis of their common experience of misogyny, their troubles are too varying to be pegged down as stemming solely from reductively patriarchal ideological and political cognates— patriarchy is a preeminent factor that causes oppression, but their oppressions are varied in accordance to the interaction of multiple factors of oppression.
The film lacks subtlety in its endorsement of retributive justice and avoids difficult questions regarding the ethics of recommending violence in response to violence. It is impossible to ignore the ethical fault-lines of a plot that lauds murder, justified as a legitimate response considering how heinous the crime is. It seeks to establish equivalence between the nature of the crime committed and the punishment inflicted, already a deeply problematic relation predicated on an economy of violence. Pertinent to this are Judith Butler’ s( 2014) observations in a review of Jacques Derrida’ s The Death Penalty. Butler’ s essay marks out some important Derridean postulations.