Writer-director Sandhya Suri has made a tense, violent and politically savvy crime procedural set in India: a film about sexism, caste bigotry and Islamophobia that doubles as a study in the complex relationship between two female cops, a cynical veteran and a wide-eyed rookie. They are terrifically played by Sunita Rajwar and Shahana Goswami in what is almost a gender-switched Indian version of Training Day.
Suri is a film-maker who 20 years ago gave us a tremendous personal essay movie I for India, and this is her fiction-feature debut, which reportedly started as a documentary project inspired by public demonstrations about the gang-rape and murder of Jyoti Singh. It centres on the Indian convention of “compassionate appointment”: the dependent widow of a public official can apply for the same job. Goswami plays Santosh, whose cop husband was killed in a riot; there are dark mutterings about the unknown culprit’s Muslim identity. With no children and no money, she successfully applies for her late husband’s position and finds herself in the thick of a controversial case: the body of a young Dalit girl, raped and murdered, has been found in a village well – and the community is in uproar about the police’s obvious caste prejudice in failing to do anything.
Battle-hardened senior inspector Geeta Sharma (a superbly intimidating Rajwar) takes over the case to calm the media, and she likes the look of this new constable Santosh. Goswami shows how Santosh is smart and industrious, yet biddable, and she can deal with the problem that male officers are too fastidious to handle: a female corpse. Even before Sharma’s dubious mentorship, Santosh has shown herself a natural at the job, which often involves morality-police-type harassing of young couples on the street; she grins with secret pleasure at getting a bribe, which she then has to surrender, in a neat twist of natural justice. Despite her obvious high-mindedness, Santosh is in fact far from averse to the arts of menacing, bullying, lying and torturing suspects in a world where getting the exact culprit isn’t as important as brutally punishing someone to deter others.
In some complex, dysfunctional way that she herself doesn’t understand, Santosh is on a personal mission to get closure or revenge for her husband. Goswami lets us see her quiet pride and even suppressed euphoria in her uniform: as a woman she has been a second-class citizen all her life and now, though naturally subordinate to the arrogant and lax male officers, her uniform lets her walk the streets in a new confident way. What had her relationship with her husband been like? It was a “love marriage”, she says, and it happened in the face of opposition from his family who resented the paltry dowry. But does she now love her husband most for his absence, his sacrifice, for re-creating her as Santosh the cop, the detective, the avenger? It’s a tough, sinewy, satisfying film.
• Santosh is in UK and Irish cinemas from 21 March.
