Maxance Vincent
In mainstream Hindi cinema, the idea of discussing the corrupt practices of India’s police force doesn’t happen. If it does, the corrupt individuals will ultimately be redeemed and find a better way forward. This was the entire thesis of Rohit Shetty’s Simmba, which examined how a corrupt police officer (Ranveer Singh) ultimately saw the light after tragedy struck a person he loved. The rest of his Cop Universe films are blatant glorifications of the police and never question how the system may benefit the ones in power rather than truly serve the people equally.
In Santosh, the official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards for the United Kingdom (since India selected Kiran Rao’s Lost Ladies, a rather gutless choice when the politically-charged independent films have far more social importance than the ultra-commercial, crowd-pleasing one), director Sandhya Suri questions the very essence of the Indian police system through the eyes of its titular character, played by Shahana Goswami. After her husband’s death, Santosh faces homelessness since her apartment given by the government is now available for another family to move into. Her husband was a police officer and, we learn, was struck to death during a riot. She’s visibly shaken but can’t risk becoming homeless, especially when she isn’t making any money and her family isn’t willing to help her.
That’s why she ultimately decides to take her husband’s position as a constable and work in the police system, which would be the only way to keep her flat, make money, and obtain his pension. No one could fault her for making such a decision since, at 28 years old, with barely anything to get by and no one to support her, becoming a police officer may be the only viable option for Santosh to secure a financially stable life. For a while, her job is routine until a young girl from the Dalits is murdered, prompting a wave of uproar against the police officers who were warned about her disappearance but chose not to investigate or do anything about it because of her “lower caste.”
Santosh knew that the girl was missing because she had taken the father to the police station so he could file a complaint. In a chillingly horrifying sequence, none of the officers want to help him, and, even worse, they don’t trust Santosh enough to write his complaint simply because she is a woman. It makes her fate entirely their fault when the young girl is ultimately found raped and murdered at the bottom of a well. A political crisis intensifies between the Dalits and the police, who task Santosh with investigating the girl’s death alongside the more experienced Geeta Sharma (Sunita Rajwar).
The two begin to find clues on a male suspect, which all align with him being the primary perpetrator of the murder. Santosh and Sharma promptly arrest him. At that specific moment, Suri’s deliberately paced film takes an extremely dark turn. It effectively interrogates the corrupt practices of India’s police system in ways that mainstream cinema doesn’t want to dare. What happens when an individual experiences a personal clash between what she thinks the police should do and what the police do? Suri smartly doesn’t give away any answers, but she deftly posits this question as the integral clue in Santosh’s narrative arc, which unfolds rather slowly but quietly devastates when the film reaches its sobering final image.
The pacing is undoubtedly an issue, especially in its opening moments. One doesn’t have a sense of who Santosh is until about forty minutes or so into the movie when Suri begins to explore the character while she is investigating the murder. The use of no external music, apart during the end credits and in several sections where diegetic music plays, adds to the stark realism Suri wants to depict in her 128-minute-long feature. But we do ultimately feel distant from Santosh in the moments where our connection with the protagonist should be at its highest, especially before the inciting incident kicks off the plot in motion.
Still, Lennert Hillege’s camera immerses us in the movie’s realistic visual approach. It pairs well with how Payal Kapadia moved away from the stereotypical images of India (in that case, Mumbai) in All We Imagine as Light. Maybe Suri’s movie does have the hurdle of releasing a month after such an acclaimed title, which is being nominated for awards left and right, but both approaches in shooting in India are far removed from how they are shot in mainstream movies. Look at how Shetty captures Delhi in Indian Police Force as an example. He placates every frame with the racist yellow tint that Kapadia and Suri move away from to show what India actually looks like during the day and, most beautifully, at night.
Like Kapadia, Suri captures night scenes with staggering blues and day sequences with no added filters, representing this difficult story with authenticity. In one specific scene, Hillege jerks the camera in one particular direction, panning back-and-forth between Santosh, who is forced to torture the suspect to get information extracted out of him, and the alleged murderer, visibly in pain. Santosh’s eyes tell a completely different story than her actions, which Sharma implies is the right thing to do. But she is so insecure about questioning her mentor’s behavior that she ultimately falls in line, having a taste of the corruption plaguing many police officers in India and around the world.
This specific scene has a devastating effect on Santosh, who utters a few words in the movie’s last twenty minutes. But her suffocating silence speaks far louder than what she says to Sharma during the film’s most potent confrontation. Both Goswami and Rajwar give masterful turns as the police officers. Still, the former succeeds the most in making Santosh a character we are always observing, even if its first half doesn’t seem that interested in the protagonist from a screenwriting perspective.
But Goswami always is and ensures we can never look away from Santosh through her piercing eyes, giving more information than a line of dialogue ever will, or when she commits the unforgivable, after being pressured into doing so. However, once she realizes the extent of such a corrupt system, Santosh questions her place. What was once a necessary choice to keep her apartment and benefit from her late husband’s pension now doesn’t seem worth pursuing anymore.
At the beginning of Shankar’s Indian 2, Kamal Haasan narrates, “Corruption causes cancer to the nation. Corruption kills.” In Santosh, we see precisely how that cancer has fully metastasized itself to a point of no return and has caused unnecessary death and suffering for many. How can one reckon with the idea of being part of such a cancerous system that will always benefit the rich and further dehumanize the people living in such terrible conditions? In Santosh’s final scene, the protagonist knows that this system is beyond repair, and not one individual (hello, Bajirao Singham & Sangram Bhalerao) could ever save a disease that has mutated and will keep doing so forever. Perhaps benefitting from such a place may not be ideal anymore.
SCORE: ★★★1/2
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