Movie Review: Thappad (Hindi)

A slap. That's it all it takes for Amrita (a subdued Taapsee Pannu, a picture of fragile strength) to pause her duties as a dutiful homemaker and re-evaluate her life choices. It upends everything, not least the dynamic with the man in her life, Vikram (a restrained Pavail Gulati), but also the sudden realisation of being taken for granted all this time. The domestic tranquility comes undone. It's as if the slap, which happens in a moment of misdirected anger at a glitzy party, was a reward for putting her aspirations on hold to serve the needs of the family she has come into. The shock of it brings into sharp focus the unfairness of their relationship, how the scales are tipped in favour of her husband, simply because he is the one who gets the money home. She walks out. Populating the movie with an array of characters from different walks of life going through disparate experiences, Anubhav Sinha's Thappad explores pertinent themes centred around self-respect, privilege and entitlement, and most importantly, societal conditioning and the need to carve out one's own identity.

Of course, there are no easy answers, and the film, to its credit, doesn't try to. The characters (especially those who are in Amrita's orbit — her parents and her mother-in-law) are vibrantly drawn, and the central narrative is truly gripping, it's running high on dramatic fuel after all, with outbursts and confrontations aplenty. But the other strands — an affluent lawyer's desires to be equally respected at home and that of a domestic help's yearnings to enjoy the little pleasures of life — get the short shrift as is the subplot about Vikram and his mother's estrangement from his rich dad and brother, and feel shoehorned into the story with no redemptive payoffs. At one point early in the film, when the family house help mentions how she constantly endures domestic abuse at the hands of her husband, Amrita doesn't bat an eye. It's only when she herself is slapped that she begins to view it differently. It raises an interesting question — do women from lower social classes even have the opportunity, familial or societal support to walk out of abusive marriages? But these are minor niggles in what's otherwise a perfectly nuanced, well-mounted tale of rebellion that does not take sides or compromise on the semantics to reach its destination. Thappad simply hits hard.