Gargi

 

 In the opening stretch of Gargi, we get a scene in which the film's titular character, played by Sai Pallavi, is with her colleagues in the staff room in school. They see a news report about a gang rape of a minor. When a colleague tells her that the apartment being shown on TV seems to be one in her locality, she just shrugs it off. At that point, her thoughts are about her marriage, the demands that her boyfriend Pazhani's family seem to be placing on her lower middle-class family. But in the next scene, we see that the news about the rape has registered with her, for we get a flashback into an episode from her own life. We see this further when she reaches home and worries about her teenaged sister who hasn't returned home yet. But then, she moves on to her tuition and a minor romantic moment.

With such a set-up, Gautham Ramachandran establishes how we usually register such news reports. We hear, we worry about our own for that moment and then move on with our lives. But what if we become part of such reports? How does that change our lives?

We soon find out as Gargi learns that her 60-year-old father Brammananda (RS Sivaji), who works as a security guard, is also one of the accused in the gang rape about which she had heard earlier. She believes there must have been some mistake, but the cops are confident that he is one of the rapists. She reaches out to Banu Prakash (Jayaprakash), a family friend who is a top lawyer, and he, too, assures that cops might have got it wrong, and he'd get her father out in court.

But the next morning, hell breaks loose as the identity of her father is revealed by the media. Soon, Gargi's family becomes ostracised, with the public and the media baying for her father's blood. Even Banu Prakash withdraws from the case. Now, her only hope is to team up with his inexperienced junior Indrans Kaliyaperumal (Kaali Venkat), who also has stammering, and find a way to prove her dad's innocence.

A superbly shot, hard-hitting drama that unfolds more like a tense thriller, Gautham Ramachandran's Gargi is an essential film in this #MeToo era. The writing is layered, capturing the complexities involved in crimes that involve sexual abuse. Even though it is with Gargi that we travel, Gautham doesn't stop with just showing the problems that his protagonist's family faces because of what could be a hasty arrest by the police. He also shows us the problems faced by the cops, the trauma that the survivor and her family undergo, and even the compulsions that drive journalists to sensationalise such crimes. The treatment is nuanced, and even though the material offers scope to turn this film into a high-pitched moralistic tale or a whodunit, both Gautham and co-writer Hariharan Raju refrain from going for cheap genre thrills; it is the emotional fallout that is always the focus.