Would Tamil Cinema?
People say geographical location is a myth when it comes to who you are. But there are advantages and disadvantages to being born in a specific place or country. Culture always shapes how you think, conditions you to an extent. Also, it influences on what and how you expect from the world and from yourself.
The later part of life is always in your hands, I believe. Either you relearn or you stay absorbed in the same world you were grown. In the current digital era, you have too many options to expose yourself to different cultures through media and people. Cinema plays a great role in it.
Which is why I keep thinking about Andy Sachs.
Devil Wears Prada came out in 2006. A normal girl shows up to a job she didn’t plan for, gets changed by the room she walked into. She loses herself a little, makes choices she isn’t proud of, and then walks away to start over. No grand lesson. No message delivered to the audience. Just a woman becoming something, gets messy, raw, unresolved. The ending wasn’t becoming a great writer, just a start over.
Andy has no safety net. No parents nearby framing her choices. Her boyfriend leaves. The film doesn’t mourn either for long. She has no power like physical (I mean more muscular kinda), institutional, or social. She just showed up. And the plot stays with her, on her, about her.
Coming here to Tamil cinema, it has given us women who struggle with a power or a resource. Ramya in Bad Girl, Manju in Aval Appadithaan, Kavitha in Aval Oru Thodar Kathai, Thulasi in Marupadiyum, all navigating a world that wasn’t built for them. All trying to establish something for themselves. But even in their struggle, the family is in the background or it revolves around the relationships. The camera returns to them.
The woman’s story is always legible through someone else’s witness.
Bad Girl came closest. But even there, the film needed to resolve. She ends up find a place, which is still a statement. A conclusion with a message attached.
Andy doesn’t conclude. She just leaves and starts over again.
What’s missing in Tamil cinema isn’t strong women. We have those as cops, as CEOs, as survivors. What’s missing is the unprotected woman. The one whose becoming has no grand witness. The one who is just alone in it, losing herself, finding herself, no one to report back to.
That feels real. That’s what a lot of women actually live.
Would Tamil cinema have Andy?
Maybe. But, again I think it would give her a mother who calls. A resolution that means something. A message to take home. The story would need to justify her choices to the family, to the audience, to even someone.
Andy doesn’t justify anything. She just lives it. Makes wrong turns, absorbs the wrong things, and walks away when she recognizes herself in someone she doesn’t want to become (Miranda). No one has to approve that arc. No one has to witness it for it to count.
That’s what’s missing i think. Not the story of a woman succeeding or suffering. The story of a woman just… happening in her world. To herself. On her own terms, even when those terms are messy.
I am not against Indian culture. We are a collective society and there is something real and sustaining in that. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a film on the other side of the coin? Not as a statement or a lesson. Just as a story that’s also true.
Andy gets to just be a person. That’s the gap.
Cheers
Check out the previous post: What does an empty mind see? & Movie Reviews
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