Vishal Bhardwaj’s Pataakha is centred on two sisters, Badki (Radhika Madan) and Chutki (Sanya Malhotra), who struggle to tolerate each other. They fight all the time, “like animals”. They fight for the most trivial reasons – a beedi, a cellphone, a TV – and they’ve been doing so for eons. Born to the same mother, yet constantly bickering, Badki and Chutki are “like India and Pakistan”. Bhardwaj stages their initial fights with the glee of an outsider – using a jerky handheld camera, an eagerly rising background score – that follow a fixed pattern. First the sisters exchange insults, then they attack each other (pulling hair, shoving, punching), and are, finally, stopped by their father (Vijay Raaz), who calls them, “Naaspitti”. This happens more than once, giving you the impression that the siblings, their father and indeed the village itself, is stuck in time.
Even though the girls are angry and resentful, Bhardwaj’s gaze towards them is tender and empathetic, almost fatherly. Their altercations, seesawing between absurd and ludicrous, don’t disconcert us; they make us smile, setting the tone for the rest of the film. Set in a small Rajasthan village, the world of Pataakha is riveting. The fates of people here are so fickle that important matters are settled with the flip of a stone (equivalent to a coin toss). There’s a local businessman, Patel (Saanand Verma), who can’t decide which of the two girls to lust after. Badki and Chutki have dreams – the former wants to open a dairy, the latter a school – but they lack concrete plans. But most intriguingly, their closest friend, Dipper (Sunil Grover), keeps instigating them to fight.
The contrasts between Badki and Chutki are evident, but Bhardwaj gives them texture – on the first date, one discusses murder, the other opens up about learning English. Madan and Malhotra are, at all times, in sync with the writing. Both of them are revelations. Their performances are all the more impressive, because they’re new. Malhotra has only acted in Dangal (she played the role of young Babita), and this is Madan’s film debut (she’s only appeared in one TV serial, Meri Aashiqui Tum Se Hi, before) – the kind of roles that haven’t prepared them for parts as fiery and complex as these. When Badki is on screen, you expect a grimace, become filled with a sense of vague uneasiness. And Madan, channelising inner brute discontent, lives up to that image. With Malhotra, you’re much more at ease, hoping she offsets the gloom with a flicker of light – and she does, dropping an unexpected smile, changing the complexion of the scene.
You still wonder, though, where all of this is headed. Surely, the plot will kick in at some point? It can’t just be punches and insults? Bhardwaj takes longer, increasing the stakes. Chutki gets a boyfriend (an English-speaking army man played by Abhishek Duhan), and so does Badki (a junior engineer played by Namit Das). Their disagreements continue as usual. At one point, however, late in the night, Badki sees Chutki sleeping without a blanket and, with practiced annoyance, complains about her old habit and covers her. The scene jolts you with sudden sweetness and, before you can recover, it’s over. There’s a heart-warming casualness woven into it, making it unlikely poignant.
Scenes like these are rare in this film, where people are sheepish about acknowledging their love. But it soon comes in another sequence (and ends there), where Badki and Chutki are trying to explain how much they love their partners. “I love you a lot,” Badki says, “as much as the number of buffalos in this world.” “As much as there are cellphones in this world,” says Chutki. “As much as there’s milk in this world,” the scenes cut to Badki again. Bhardwaj is a master at finding poignancy amid the mundane, but he sets himself a gargantuan task in Pataakha: arriving at love through constant, mutual discontent.
This could have worked much better in a condensed piece of literature, which can afford leaps of absurdity and eccentricity, for it doesn’t run the risk of getting monotonous – such as the short story Do Behnein (by the writer Charan Singh Pathik), the film’s source text. A 134-minute film, on the other hand, is a different matter altogether. Like Badki and Chutki, their tussle is a character in itself – but one that remains a mystery. We don’t know its origins; we don’t know its context. More crucially, we don’t know its extent. Indian sibling rivalry is fairly common, which can get physical and ugly, but then people grow up, and that relationship reaches an evolved state. More importantly, those fights are just those, fights. But here you don’t get a real sense of the sisters’ relationship. Are their fights just silly? Or are they laced with a fundamental hatred? Because fighting over a beedi is one thing, and taunting the other – almost wishing them active harm – during their wedding is quite the other.
What is more worrying is that even after growing up – the sisters get married, become mothers – their relationship hardly changes. They do stop fighting, honouring a vow given to their father, but you know that these firecrackers are waiting for the light of a match, itching to explode. Besides, the constant parallels between them look contrived after a point. Sure, these sisters have always been competitive, their lives have been an unending game of one-upmanship, but they are also individuals, wanting to steer their future in distinct directions. But the film treats them as a unit – the desire and despair of one is constantly intercut (and contrasted) with the other. This looks less like a story of two sisters, and more like a screenwriting convenience, a way to look at this world from the outside.
Which could be the point. Maybe these sisters aren’t people as much as they’re metaphors, stand-ins for a bigger story Bhardwaj has in mind. Maybe they’re, as the film tells us several times, like India and Pakistan. So if these two sisters are like warring nations, then their partners are, to think of another metaphor, their nuclear capabilities. Badki gets a boyfriend, soon after Chutki starts dating, just to restore the power equation. This understated parallel, which isn’t spelled out, does make sense, eliciting a smile. But then – if this is how Bhardwaj wants us to think about his movie – the other characters (probably functioning as symbols) don’t add up. You wonder the inevitable: Who is Donald Trump here? The film offers an answer: their mother-in-law. It doesn’t make much sense. Moreover, an important part of this piece, their friend Dipper – who is exceptionally mean towards the two sisters, constantly pricking and deceiving them – hardly comes under the film’s scrutiny, leaving you confused. Dissatisfied by the film’s narrative approach, you want to latch on to its metaphorical underpinnings, but Pataakha gives little evidence that it’s thought through that alternate universe, too.
When it tries entering that realm, the approach is mostly direct and literal (with a character, for instance, talking about the state of world politics in the climax). Great films and stories work on both levels: literal and metaphorical. But Pataakha is stranded somewhere in between – its uneven text leads you to the subtext, which ends up being as dissatisfying. Think of Bhardwaj’s Shakespearean adaptions, in contrast, where text and subtext blend beautifully and wondrously. Pataakha lacks that assured touch.
Debuting with a sly, charming film, Makdee (2002), Bhardwaj quickly became a significant directorial voice. In the next seven years, he made four films, out of which two were great (Maqbool and Omkara) and two were solid (The Blue Umbrella and Kaminey). But since then, he’s struggled to maintain his form. Barring Haider, which was vintage Bhardwaj, his rest – 7 Khoon Maaf, Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola and Rangoon – have been uneven and, largely, disappointing. This dip in form is worrying, and you wonder about the batch of once-feted ‘New Bollywood’ filmmakers (making a splash in the aughts), who have consistently struggled to be consistent. We know the names – Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee, Imtiaz Ali, Sriram Raghavan, Tigmanshu Dhulia – directors whose films are still alive with promise, but who have failed to up their game, truly challenge themselves. There is such a thing as ‘Indian good’ after all (especially evident in journalism and films): of mediocrity getting applauded just because our standards and expectations are low. Being slightly better than the ordinary shouldn’t be a compliment; it should be a reminder of the long, winding road ahead.