Why isn’t rape the most heinous crime? Kooki, the opening film of the Brahmaputra Valley Film Festival 2023, aims to arrest you with that question. It jolts you with the gut-wrenching wail from the victims of sexual assault, perspectives whose painful realities are silenced, dishearteningly normalised, and looked at as part of everyday news. Every fabric of Pranab Deka’s film is built for you to absorb this helpless uproar of a teenage victim, so much so that it never finds itself searching for the answers that the collective society almost wears out asking itself.
So much so that it doesn’t wish to hide behind any subtle motions – the very word ‘rape’ gets repeated so many times, inadvertently drawing a harsh parallel to what the 16-year-old protagonist says about rape being a crime that reoccurs to the victim every passing second. When we are taken into this world, Kooki (Ritisha Khaund) is just a hormonal teenager mustering her all to talk to her crush, Saptarishi (Bodhisattva Sharma) a charming little heartthrob who ends up equally adoring her. She loves rice cakes from a local shop and she is her father’s (Rajesh Tailang) meaning to the chaos in his world as an advocate. All she wished for was for her first kiss to be a romantic event under the rain.
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In a gruesome scene that almost angers you with its unrestrained depiction and insensitive re-emphasis of disturbing details, Kooki’s reality gets shattered. What follows is a close-in on the physical and emotional turmoil that she goes through in recovery, as closed ones are forced to pull themselves up and deal with a trauma no soul deserves to be left with. On one hand, SP Mandira Singh (Dipannita Sharma) and her team follow the breadcrumbs of clues to the perpetrators, while the shockwaves the crime sent to the larger society bring out voices, like journalist Navnita, to the ground. Kooki’s father, an advocate named Dhananjay Mishra, ensures justice doesn’t suffer in the maze that legal procedures can become.
‘Kooki’ (Hindi)
Director: Pranab Deka
Cast: Ritisha Khaund, Rajesh Tailang, Bodhisattva Sharma
Runtime: 115 minutes
Storyline: A 16-year-old survivor of gangrape questions the justice system on the inadequacy of the justice she gets
Yet, for all that it strives to do, Kooki is bent on not taking steps beyond the questions it poses on the need for an alternate justice. It becomes a reminder of a question that must be asked every day, but its refusal to find answers only leaves you back to an even hopeless reality, one in which many victims don’t even get the ‘justice’ that Kooki says isn’t enough. Even what it says to the victims suffering from PTSD gets lost in its urgency to deliver its final say. It doesn’t help the film that lacks a flow; scenes sometimes appear as chunks strung together linearly and it is bound to tire out a first-time audience waiting for it to become anything more.
Performances keep you glued. Bodhisattva is certainly a talent to look for; in the innocence when he says ‘don’t go’ to a lover’s evening adieus, in his guilt-ridden breakdown on how the incident had transpired, Saptarishi tugs at your heart in however little his views get a share in what happened to Kooki. Tailang gives his all as Kooki’s father, Dhananjay Mishra, but the film struggles to play him as both a stoic lawyer and a devastated father. It is Ritisha as Kooki who leaves you broken with a lasting image of a traumatised young girl who must every day battle her demons that appear in newer forms.
Yes, Kooki could have been more, but we must also ask ourselves: If there are no answers to the question, isn’t the question more worthy of being asked time and again? Isn’t the existence of the question vile enough to prevent humans from turning into beasts? Isn’t the question enough? “Why isn’t rape the most heinous crime?”
The writer is in Jyoti Chitrabon Film Studio, Guwahati, Assam, at the invitation of the Brahmaputra Valley Film Festival