Editorial: Quo Vadis, Laapataa Ladies?

CHENNAI: This week, India’s official entry in the Best International Feature category at the 97th Academy Awards, Laapataa Ladies, was shown the door from the Oscars race. The Hindi film, directed by Kiran Rao is a crowd-pleasing satire that examined gender dynamics and patriarchy in rural India. But it failed to make the cut in the shortlist of 15 feature films that will be vying for a spot in the final five, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) announced. Interestingly, British-Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri's Santosh, starring Indian actors Shahana Goswami and Sunita Rajwar, representing the UK, has made it to the list.

It was in September that the Film Federation of India (FFI) announced Laapataa Ladies as India’s official entry for the Oscars. The decision had sparked a debate among cinephiles and members of the independent film fraternity – considering that Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, a sublime exploration of female desire, which bagged the Grand Prix at the Cannes film festival this year, was also in contention for the India submission. The internationally acclaimed feature had been sidelined in favour of a film, which was by and large viewed as a simplistic, commercial entertainer that ticked all the required boxes with the Indian audiences.

Filmgoers took exception to an argument pitched by FFI President, Ravi Kottarakara, who defended the selection of films, saying Kapadia’s film felt like a foreign film, while Rao’s film had elements specific to the Indian experience. Having said that, it is worth remembering that there are several factors that determine a film qualifying for the Academy shortlist. Films vying for a spot at the Oscar table are usually backed by significant financial muscle, coughed up by production companies that have their fingers in many pies.

There also hangs the cloud of a certain bias towards films emerging from first world nations, depicting the human condition with a preternatural white bias. A case in point, the winner of the Best Foreign Language feature in 2020 was Another Round, a Danish film detailing the exploits of a group of school teachers who embark on an experiment to maintain a constant level of intoxication throughout the workday. Prior to that in 2013, the Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino walked away with the top honour for his film La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty), a Federico Fellini-esque takedown of the decadent lives of Rome’s bourgeoisie, filmed in a rapturous, stream of consciousness fashion.

Then of course, there’s the all-season favourite of the Academy vis-a-vis the Best Foreign Film category – the Holocaust, and War Dramas. Last year, Britain submitted a cinematic adaptation of Martin Amis’s harrowing WW-II novel, set around the fringes of Auschwitz, called The Zone of Interest. The film catalogues the mundanity of the everyday lives of camp commandant Rudolf Hoss and his family, who live in a picturesque home adjoining the walls of the death camp. A year before, it was the German war film All Quiet on the Western Front. And in 2015, the Academy gave its nod to Son of Saul, a Hungarian film about Sonderkommandos at Auschwitz.

It is within this indecipherable mishmash of PTSD-driven filmmaking, accented by first world problems, that we here in India are attempting to pitch feel good dramas with happy endings as our calling card to the Oscar stage. And it begs the question: Quo Vadis?