Qala: Anvitaa Dutt continues making beautifully filmed bad movies for Netflix – The Indian Express
Qala: Anvitaa Dutt continues making beautifully filmed bad movies for Netflix – The Indian Express
Post Credits Scene: With superficial flamboyance that routinely undermines its serious themes, director Anvitaa Dutt’s new Netflix film Qala repeats all the mistakes of her first, Bulbbul.
Nearly every problem with writer-director Anvitaa Dutt’s debut film Bulbbul could be felt, all at the same time, in one scene.
Framed from the perspective of Rahul Bose’s villainous Thakur, it culminated with a burst of graphic violence inflicted upon Triptii Dimri’s titular naïf.
The odd move to present a woman’s brutal beatdown from the male abuser’s point-of-view aside, the scene remains memorable for Dutt’s aesthetic choices.
But more than anything else, it represented Dutt’s tendency to sacrifice story and character at the altar of superficial beauty.
Perhaps validated by Bulbbul’s generally positive reception, she chose to double down on that aesthetic — both visually and thematically — in her recent second feature, Qala..
It’s a film that romanticises female suffering, presenting it not as a horrid truth of patriarchal society, but as a rite of passage instead.
Qala, the character, is a mentally ill musician who murders an innocent boy in a sustained display of jealousy, and yet, the movie portrays her as a tragic heroine.
The film is essentially a series of distraction tactics — immaculate frames, pretty faces in those immaculate frames, and grand music surrounding immaculate frames with pretty people in them.
Your attention is repeatedly directed towards Qala’s lush cinematography and soundscape, and not towards the characters that they’re supposed to service..
The most egregious example of this is a third-act scene in which Qala is forced to perform oral sex on a sleazy record executive.
It’s constructed in such a disjointed manner that for a moment, it’s unclear what’s even happening.
We watch as the honcho, played by Amit Sial, expresses ecstasy, seemingly standing by himself on a moonlit rooftop.
But Dutt’s frame is so crowded that there’s a good chance that you, like me, will be distracted by the unfinished Howrah Bridge in the background instead of focusing on Qala’s face..
It’s understandable for an audience that only watches Marvel blockbusters and Kantara to not know the difference.
But Dutt tends to direct in tableaus; it’s as if she wants every moment of her movies to be paused, admired, and then used as a wallpaper.
Now, compare this to a similar scene in Blonde, another recent Netflix film ostensibly also about a young woman’s troubled relationship with her mother, framed against her rise and fall in the world of entertainment.
But consider the scene in which she is made to perform a similar sexual act on John F Kennedy.
Both Bulbbul and Qala, on the other hand, not only centre the men, but make the abuse of women breathtakingly beautiful to look at..
When you peel away the film’s outer layers, it becomes clear that Dutt doesn’t think much of her audience.
In Bulbbul, she presented the titular character’s transformation into a man-eating witch as a plot twist, even though it was obvious from the beginning that she was the mysterious murderess all along.
And in Qala, the death of Babil Khan’s character by slow poisoning is also designed as a massive reveal, despite the film having telegraphed this plot development ages ago.
Further disjointedness can be felt when Babil Khan is given a grand introductory scene early in the film, mere moments after he’d already been introduced.
And then there are the obvious acts of plagiarism, which, for some reason, Dutt makes more conspicuous by squeezing into one surreal sequence.
It’s the one that reminded people who watched the trailer of Darren Aronofsky’s similarly themed modern masterpiece Black Swan.
Distracted by the visuals, you might not notice that the background music in this scene has been lifted from another Netflix title, David Fincher’s serial killer show Mindhunter.
Post Credits Scene is a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters.
Triptii Dimri on how she built her character with Anvitaa Dutt for Qala: From imaginary mother to stolen lipsticks.
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Read Article: The Indian Express