*spoilers on Bulbul*
"Fact doesn't find takers, fiction does". This is an interesting statement I read online, and this is what I'd like to borrow to start my blog today.
Time and again, we read news facts about gender abuse but when it got sewed into a fictional story, we love it.
This movie is quite thought provoking.
A minor glitch in Bulbul was that it was predictable but the way it twisted an age old folklore of "chudail" or "female demon" into a strong fictional story of a woman was beautiful.
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" is proved once again! I didn't know that in olden days (British India) little girls were married off to older men. I had only heard of child marriages. But if this is true, then we have a much larger patriarchy at play in our roots.
The toxic masculinity imbibed in our upbringing that "men will be men" is painted in this movie when that creepy sister in law hides her husband to protect him and women across the village lie about falling down the stairs to hide being physically abused. I hate to admit I wasn't quite intrigued when I first saw the trailer, because it comes off as a horror flick. But when you watch the movie and it's beautiful cinematography, giving the whole movie a red and pink backdrop, it entices you. I liked the movie more as I kept thinking about it.
Sexual assault and domestic violence shown in its entirety! Bulbul urges you to think of the irony of human demons hiding in the society and the one who acts as the messiah of the abused and who avenges the brutality done to the "weaker sex" is called a real 'chudail' or demon! When I first saw the movie I felt it's a little off..but later thinking about it, I realized, this is actually shown in the 18th century!
The times where we have heard stories of Nangeli, a young woman in the 18th century who cut off her breasts to protest against the rule made by the "upper caste" to walk without covering her superior part (upper half) of the body!
We' d like to think women are emancipated now but it's not true. As long as Abhaya's and Jyoti's are raped and murdered horrifyingly we will need "horror" movies like Bulbul to remind us of the misogyny that still prevails in society centuries later!
A shout out to the director Anvita Dutt, the producer Anushka Sharma and the actor Tripti Dimri.
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