Watch a lot of international cinema, and certain border-transcending concerns tend to surface. This year, I’ve seen many films about the myriad subtle ways that societies fence their women in. Sometimes there are blatantly misogynistic laws. But the character-driven storytelling at which movies excel is good for surfacing less obvious methods of subjection, including unspoken social taboos, ambient threats of violence and the indifference of men when women face injustice. I’ve seen this theme in movies from Iran (“The Seed of the Sacred Fig“), Japan (“Black Box Diaries”), Pakistan (“In Flames”), Malaysia (“Tiger Stripes”), Norway (“Armand”), Ireland (“Small Things Like These”) and, of course, the United States (“Good One,” “The Substance,” “Woman of the Hour”) — just to name a few.
“Santosh,” written and directed by Sandhya Suri, is another. Set in rural northern India, it is technically a crime drama in which a police officer investigates a murder. But it’s bigger than that: “Santosh” is equally about the methods by which the poor and oppressed are kept in their place, and about what it means to be woman among men who aren’t at all interested in sharing their power.
The police officer at the center of this story hadn’t planned to be one. After two years of marriage, Santosh Saini (Shahana Goswami) her beloved husband, a police constable, dies. Heartbroken and largely abandoned by her in-laws, sh inherits his job, an unusual turn of events, but not a bad one. She joins the force, wearing a khaki uniform and working alongside the few women there and a host of loutish men.
One day she overhears a father talking about his missing teenage daughter. When her body turns up, it’s evident she has been raped and murdered. But her family is Dalit, the lowest in the caste hierarchy, and the authorities are not inclined to care about her death until a Muslim boy becomes the suspect, triggering the community’s Islamophobia.
Geeta Sharma (Sunita Rajwar), a prominent female officer, is put in charge of the investigation, and enlists Santosh as her right-hand woman and de facto mentee. It’s a good fit: Santosh, worried about the girl’s family and horrified by what has happened, is determined to find out what’s going on.
But while the mystery provides the plot, it’s not the point of the movie. Instead, Goswami’s measured and emotional performance gives us a window into Santosh’s slowly growing realizations about the police and their operations. She watches as they coerce confessions through violent means, take bribes and otherwise prove to be cruel or incompetent.
Eventually she is forced to confront her place in this justice system. “Santosh” critiques its own country’s police force, and the inhumanity of the broader community’s prejudices, with biting directness. At one point, Santosh chuckles while watching a video on her phone that splices together film footage of well-heeled cops in other nations with buffoonish footage of Indian officers.
But the movie is also a bit hard to watch. Cruel violence is part of Santosh’s job, and as she grows acclimated to it, we see more of it too: beatings and torture to extract confessions, even false ones. Truth and fairness get twisted when law enforcement has its own set of aims.
Caste and religion and class and gender are all part of this system, and that’s the broader critique in “Santosh,” which is quite furious by the end. You start to see how every element of the story demonstrates a deck stacked against someone: the Dalit community, the Muslim boy, the girl who was murdered, the female police officers.
And, of course, Santosh, who as a woman and a widow is not taken seriously by the men who hold power in the community. In the stacked hierarchies of “Santosh,” everyone is trying to scramble upward by stepping on the person below.
You could tell this story from many characters’ perspectives, each of which would give a glimpse into a different form of oppression based on some cultural divide. Since it centers on Santosh, the focus is the myriad ways women are disregarded by wealthy and powerful men and, at the same time, how women can become complicit in the problem. I don’t have to tell you that problem extends far beyond one country’s borders.
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