There are some films that seduce us with starkness. Rahul Dahiya’s G Kutta Se in Haryanvi and Hindi is not one of them. This extraordinary film derives its unhampered persuasive powers not from posturing but from ripping apart all our perceptions of what cinema is and should be , by entering the nervous system of a patriarchal community where women are still not given the right to choose their partners.
And even if they are, this is a right men can snatch away at will.
Sex, says debutant writer-director Rahul Dahiya is used in gender-challenged societies to negotiate the spaces that divide men from women and to bring the women to heel, preferably spiked. On more than one occasion a man is seen forcing himself on a woman arguing she has nothing to lose if she has sex with him.
The women’s will is not just secondary , it is often non-existent. This stunning piece of cinematic invention opens with a man groping a sleeping woman and masturbating…Save your shocked responses for later. As we move ahead through Rahul Dahiya’s crime-infested morally degenerate badlands at the Delhi border ,the narrative is unsparing in its brutally.
The harsh merciless hinterland generates the worst kind of patriarchal prejudice and violence, as one young borderline-antisocial man Virender(Rajveer Singh) grapples with turbulent inner world of bias mixed with a dash of modern liberalism.
Eventually, though, Virender becomes that bigoted radical automaton we see all around us, slaughtering human beings and their morale for suspected disrespecting of cows, heckling young couples in the park, appointing themselves as judge and executioners of our social order….
There is an ongoing rush of urgent subtexts coursing through the veins of this virile film. But there is so much happening on the surface, we can get to what lies underneath only after we stop gawking in stunned silence at the visuals that director Dahiya has accumulated in an onrush of barbaric brilliance.
Be warned. G Kutta Se is not an easy film to watch .The camera(Sachin Singh) moves like a seething predator through the rugged landscape combing hearts and loins for signs of fugitive compassion. This fuming film stomps resolutely on all our cinematic perceptions to give us a fresh imminent and extremely disconcerting view of reality at the grassroot level.
A young girl Diksha(Vibha Tyagi) who is a hapless victim of an MMS scandal is brutally murdered by her parents.A girl Kiran(Neha Chauhan) who dares to fall in love with a man of her choice(Nitin Pandit, brilliant) is dragged out of a hotel room while eloping and brutally humiliated on the street by the cops, a married woman who has run away with her lover is almost gangraped in a moving car…
The inevitability with which one catastrophic illustration of societal psychosis is heaped on another could have made this an unbearably topheavy film. Rahul Dahiya succeeds in making every episode seem so real and palpable, you will get the feeling of being there, though you’d often wish you weren’t.
G Kutta Se is an acutely disturbing exposition on radical witch-hunting. The film resorts to a tone of narration that brooks no inflexions. Its unflinching unblinking long and hard stare at tradition-sanctioned violence against women makes it one of the darkest films in living memory. The narrative moves restlessly through a series of events that seem unrelated initially, but come together finally in a damning indictment of a social order that sanctions a negotiable space for a woman’s sexuality but does not allow her to be an equal participant with the male in the process of negotiation.
Dahiya’s writing is savagely humorous at times.A horny lover-boy sneaks his girlfriend into an empty ramshackle grocery store for some sex. When she won’t go all the way he’s left to his own (handheld) devices….A runway woman(Rashmi Somvanshi) trapped in a car with a group of sexually aggressive men snatches a drink and gulps it down.
We heard a lot about how a woman’s ‘no’ means a no. G Kutta Se tells us how and why a woman’s ‘no’ can mean a ‘yes’ , and if not then how it can be construed as a ‘yes’ .
This is not a film with easy solutions to age-old problems of gender discrimination. Nor does it offer us the comfort of neat cinematic solutions. Its sexual frankness and an unrelenting view of the residual violence of ‘real India’ make us wince and squirm and often wish we were some place else.
If only there was a better place to run off to.
Subhash K Jha tracked down director Rahul Dahiya for an interview on his neglected masterpiece. “I feel my film did not get its due. And it was not taken up by any proper production house to place it well despite its Filmfare nominations.Most definitely there are many things which I could have done better, now I feel the entire first part till we reach back to the village could have been much much better, and yes, some performances could have been better.”
Speaking on the genesis of the film, Dahiya says, “ I think it was prompted by the idea of love—how deep, intoxicating, and powerful this feeling can be that it breaks all the barriers, boundaries, and rules our society tries to force upon such a powerful natural instinct, which is to feel. Without this instinct, the human race wouldn’t propagate. The feeling is so powerful that many have not even cared for the threat to their lives. There was one such case in which the tables turned and resulted in many deaths, prompting me to investigate this conflict via this film.There are many cultures where people get married within close relations. I am not trying to promote that, but it exists, and nobody under the sky can claim to be better than another. It is this identity—this claim of one’s religion or culture being better—that has brought the maximum suffering to humankind, and I feel that love is the only answer. As Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Even if one tries to harm a weak dog, it will fight back, potentially resulting in something terrible.If it’s harmful for individuals to get married within a close bloodline, then let it be; they will suffer the consequences. It’s like you are trying to do good for somebody through hatred, even to the extent of killing them. I think that was driven by ego, and I feel like, as with all things, it was a small percentage who adhered to such laws. Even that is changing drastically now due to exposure through phones and social media. I feel the overexposure has blunted the reaction, and it’s becoming milder now. The focus is more on survival, which is getting difficult by the day without jobs and correct prices for crops, etc.For the community I belong to, I have always had tremendous respect for the wit, sharpness of mind, honesty, and strength of character our ancestors had, which is rare these days.In the Kisan Andolan, the way this entire region stood against tyranny as a community and how people came together with a selfless feeling of giving and helping was an important event in itself. I feel everything is part of evolution, and we will evolve out of such societal convulsions with time.
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