Thappad’s poster crystallises this attitude in four cleverly chosen
words: bas itni si baat? – is that all? Most of the people in Anubhav Sinha’s film,
built around a single slap, feel this way too, not least the perpetrator,
Vikram (Pavail Gulati). But his wife, Amrita, at the receiving end of the blow,
can’t get past it. Amrita is played by Taapsee Pannu, the trauma and fear
perpetually on the actor’s face in Pink replaced here by a great sadness. It’s clever symbolic
casting, a recognition that the difference between the violence in the two
films is only a matter of degree, that “even one slap is too many" is a
logical extension of “no means no". Amrita wakes up every morning with the
alarm. While her husband continues to sleep, she waters the plants, harvests
aromatic leaves, grated ginger, and makes tea. She tests her mother-in-law’s
blood sugar levels. She then wakes her husband, brings him tea in bed. He gets
ready, she makes breakfast. He’s always in a hurry to leave for work, so she
runs after like he’s a school-going child, pressing food and essentials into
his hands.
When we see
this routine for the second time repeated almost action for action, it becomes
clear how dependent Vikram is on Amrita, and how contented she is beginning her
day by making sure his day starts well. To us, the power imbalance and his
self-absorption are evident, but they seem a happy couple, right up until
Vikram receives bad news from work during a house party. As he yells at a
colleague, Amrita tries to pull him away. Suddenly, he turns and slaps her. Vikram’s
mother (Tanvi Azmi) and Amrita’s own mother (Ratna Pathak) and brother (Ankur
Rathee) are shocked, but advise her to shrug it off. For a while, she tries. We
see the routine again, performed without love. But Vikram’s inability to treat
the incident as anything but an accumulation of pressure on him breaks her
further. When she arrives at her parents’ home one night, only her father seems
to understand how serious she is about leaving Vikram. Kumud Mishra is
incredible in the part, his perennially gentle tones masking the anger he feels
on his daughter’s behalf. Thappad juxtaposes the Amrita-Vikram the incident with fraught relations between the film’s other couples. The domestic
worker is routinely beaten by her husband; not long after Amrita is slapped, we
see her slapped as well (Sinha and co-writer Mrunmayee Lagoo’s view of
relationships in economically backward households as violent and doltish are
disappointing). There are adultery and a scene that borders on marital rape.
Vikram’s mother and father don’t live together. Only Amrita’s parents get
along, and even there it’s revealed that her mother gave up dreams of being a
singer after getting married. While the writers' intention is clear, the
obviousness is grating. The well-observed smaller slights – complaints about
cooking, unthinking putdowns – lose their sting in a sea of injustices. Sinha’s tendency to hammer the audience gets in the
way of his narratives. As if hearing thappad every few scenes weren’t enough, whenever Vikram says the name
of his boss, Thapar, it sounds like thaapad. We’re made to notice every detail of Amrita’s morning
routine fall apart in her absence: Vikram not getting his tea the way he likes
it, his mother nearly dying because her blood sugar isn’t monitored, even a
pointed shot of the plant's Amrita used to water, now withered. There are times
you wish Sinha could take some of the weight off his writing with inventive
filmmaking. But he isn’t a visual director, and the 142-minute Thappad mostly has the look and rhythms of a stage play. In
the absence of brevity, there’s uncommon restraint, both in staging and
performance, and the kind of quiet hurt that Hindi cinema doesn’t often access.
When Amrita says “Perhaps I turned myself into the kind of the person who could
be slapped," it’s with a rueful self-awareness that understands why the
women in Awaara and Kabir Singh respond to violence with more love.
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