Shonali Bose's 'Margarita With A Straw' is courageous and sensitive, but fails to become more than a sum of its parts, says Ajachi Chakrabarti.
Margarita With A Straw
Director: Shonali Bose
Starring: Kalki Koechlin, Revathi, Sayani Gupta, Kuljeet Singh
Rating: 3/5
Early in Shonali Bose’s second film Margarita With A Straw—a decade after her celebrated 2005 debut, Amu—Laila, Kalki’s cerebral palsy-afflicted protagonist, writes a killer rock song for her band to perform in an inter-college competition. It really is a killer song (‘Dosokute’, composed and sung by Joi Barua) and wins them the competition, but then the judge ruins it by announcing that when they heard the song had been composed by a disabled person, they just had to award them the prize. “Tumhari journey doosre bachchon se, normal bachchon se, alag hai,” she says, turning to Laila. “Would you like to share something with us?” Laila flips her off, to the cheers of the audience.
Margarita With A Straw is at its best when thumbing its nose at the stereotypical depictions of disability. Laila is no victim, no brave soul facing down insurmountable odds to attain some major triumph that will leave anyone who watches it teary-eyed. She’s a gawky 19-year-old, a Lajpat Nagar middle-class girl getting on the giddy journey of self-discovery that is college. She’s making new friends, trying to stop her mother—and primary caregiver, played by Revathi, in a performance that is as good as, if not better than, Kalki’s; either way, their relationship is the film’s soul—from embarrassing her by boasting about how talented she is. She’s coming to terms with her own sexuality, asking creepy Palika Bazaar shopkeepers if they stock vibrators, making out with a weelchair-bound friend (“Hame aur explore karna hai”). She’s crushing over Nima, the lead singer of her band.
That last bit leads to that rite of passage for all teenagers: her first heartbreak. It is very well done; the darkening of her mother’s face when Laila tells her that “Ek ladka pasand hai” and Nima’s awkward fumbling on hearing Laila’s declaration of love both convey all that is needed without resorting to overwrought speeches. Laila is devastated, but all is forgotten once she gets a scholarship to a creative writing course at New York University. Despite her father’s objections—What if something happens? Aren’t there enough opportunities in Delhi?—mother and daughter are adamant. Unfortunately, moving to the Big Apple is when the story starts going downhill before falling apart when she comes back.
New York, as the cliché goes, is a character in the film. It is a liberating influence on our heroine, a city where her disability is not an impediment to exploring it, thanks to its wheelchair-friendly public transport. Laila and her mother arrive at the height of winter, and the bond between them grows deeper as they face the city together. In one of the unspoken scenes that beautifully establishes their relationship, as Laila gets on her first bus ride, her aai discreetly follows her, keeping a watchful eye. Inevitably, though, Laila wants more space, more privacy, and mom flies home.
Laila moves in with Khanoum, a blind Pakistani-Bangladeshi student who she met at a protest and has started a love affair with. It’s skilfully set up, mostly through non-verbal cues, but is too on-the-nose when it finally happens, Khanoum seducing Laila after a night of drinking and dancing. The montaged affair is full of the typical New York picture postcard scenes romcoms have done to death, even if the obvious chemistry between the two makes it better than average.
The rest of the movie is an emotional roller coaster, as Laila struggles with her new bisexual identity while her mother battles cancer. Again, the setup to this reveal is also subtle: one seemingly throwaway hospital scene, another one where she’s looking at a mirror and taking off her wig. But this is where Bose’s narrative economy gives way to a deluge of drama. The various arcs, each compelling in its own way, collide in a manner that is not just unconvincing, but unnecessary. Sure, it’s a brave decision to depict Laila as flaky and manipulative—to not beatify her, as Rajiv Masand puts it in his review—but her relationship troubles are too clumsily portrayed. (The tendency of the film to leave things unsaid backfires, as the conflict just seems half-baked.) All the good work that has gone into establishing Laila and Khanoum as flesh-and-blood characters is wasted as they start acting like archetypes, and a film that has hitherto eschewed sentimentality becomes a cloying mess. Worse, the last 15 minutes raise uncomfortable questions about the film itself.
Bose says she was inspired to make this film after a cousin suffering from cerebral palsy told her that all she wanted for her 40th birthday was to have sex. It was the first time, she’s said in interviews, that she had thought about her cousin’s sexuality. The fact that such a realisation—that the differently-abled might have the same hormonal impulses as ‘normal’ people—is a laudable innovation says more about our society and our cinema than about this particular film. (As Khanoum says at one point, “Get with the century.”) Celebrating Laila’s right to have a sexuality to explore is well and good, but it was disappointing that the film chose to do so in the most obvious way possible, and that this was the only aspect of Laila’s personality that was adequately explored. The working title of the film, after all, was Chhoone Chali Aasmaan. Sure, we didn’t need miraculous feats, but it would have been nice if the expansion of Laila’s horizons had also extended beyond the bedroom, if A Woman Like That wasn’t the only book we ever see her reading, if she and Khanoum—who’d met at a protest, after all—would have had a single conversation that didn’t have to do with their relationship or the struggles of coming out.
Margarita With A Straw was a movie I wanted to like more. It’s progressive, courageous, sensitive and understated. It has some excellent performances, and fantastic dynamics between characters. But in the final reckoning, the lack of substance is as infuriating as it is disappointing; the film doesn’t become more than the sum of its parts.
