Bol- The Unspeakable.

            Sometime a movie could be so thought provoking that it could eventually lead to penning down a few things about it, pulling you out of that proverbial Writer’s Block. As the title suggest- Bol (meaning ‘word’ while it is used as a noun and “speak” in the imperative form), the movie has to deal with an issue. Its picturization underlines both talent and courage. Living in the Subcontinent, leading a sedentary life is one thing, attacking the Powers that be is entirely another thing. And when it comes to interrogating loudly on issues pertaining to religious anarchy, the Subcontinent could prove to be a boiling point. Interrogation it does, there is no drop of a hat solution provided, everything needs to pass through self interrogation: one of the last dialogues of the film by the TV correspondent amply proves this point. The plot is laden with paradoxes, “why did you commit honor killing on a boy, it’s only meant for girls”: the spectator confronts with the uneasy truth as to which one is the bigger crime, “honor killing”, or honor killing a boy.

            Before this writing becomes too confusing, there is a bit of summary. It’s a family of a Hakeem (a Shaman), that finds it hard to make both ends meet, as there is only one person earning and as many as 9 people to feed ( or even more), the father keeps on producing baby girls in the hope for a baby boy. As says one of the novels by Truman Capote, “more tears are shed over answered prayers”, the father gets his wish fulfilled in the form of a Transsexual, Cross-dresser boy. Much to the chagrin of the father and the mother, the boy fails to become a man, and considered to be girlish (Sic.), and it’s interesting to see how this young boy perceives “manliness”: “Showing anger, shouting at ones family and beating them too”, that’s how he defines being a man, and he is not far from the truth either. One nearly feels that the discourse is heading towards traditional feminism, until the sisters convince him that all five fingers are not the same. The father continues to breed and it’s the daughter who initiates actions against his religious bigotry and foolhardiness.  

            The scriptwriter of the film turns the tables by getting the young boy raped and eventually murdered by his father in the name of “honor” killing. The concept is that an orthodox primitive society tends to destroy the very notion of being a girl, as opposed to what many Khaps and Lady Saints try to feed us by attributing the cause of these assaults to the manners, clothes of a girl. It’s the girlhood or the womanhood itself, an Essentialised way of looking at genders; creating the differences, that attracts these assaults, that make them more vulnerable, and often it’s also used as a tool of subjugation. And here lies the paradox of the movie, the only one to justify the title of the film is the eldest daughter, not only out of a solidarité feminine, but also because she distinguishes well between what is right and what is not, moving away from the garb of Marxist Feminism to the one proposed by Julia Kristeva, “politics of situation”. The director remains on the solid ground and does not let the film stray away into abstraction where all the cacophony would turn this socially relevant theme into a red herring. The elder daughter refuses any paternal authority based upon bovine stupidity and the concept of reason of the mighty, even going as far as getting her mother operated for vasectomy against the desires of the father, who considers it as sin against his Almighty.

 Here we enter into the danger zone: religion. Anything that enters into the society, either bad or very bad, has to pass through religious tenets, and this idea being unquestionable, the father finds himself in a double authoritarian position, that of a male, and as if being a male in place like Subcontinent was not cruel enough, he is also an ad-hoc religious authority, like a middle ages catholic preacher or like a 21^st century Hindu Godman or goddamn. The plot gets bolder specially weighing on the fact that any blasphemy could lead to a social boycott or even to death. But the director carefully handles it by portraying it as a problem of interpretation of these scriptures by different people. Whereas the daughter reads them pragmatically, the father tries to apply them so wastefully that he ends up making a mockery of it: getting involved into polygamy with a prostitute, a destitute in her own way, and also committing all possible crimes like bribing the police to get away with the murder of his son. He considers all these actions pardonable by his almighty and not the bigger crimes like checking the population at home, looking for a job, or even falling in love with a guy of same age (but of different community)- within the community a “boy” as old as the father’s age is acceptable too, only he should not be elder (to the father I mean).         

            The film also swims in the danger zone by not exploiting the traditional method of mockery on bigotry: Humor. As Henri Bergson would have agreed, Humor mitigates the effect of shock: Rushdie, Charlie Hebdo, and more recently, a less serious attempt in the form of a movie Oh My God was a reminder to this fact that anomalies revealed in a lighter vein, taking recourse to humor, become digestible even in complete totalitarian regimes. In this film, the director dared the wrath. A lot of irony emerges in the plot, be it the birth of a different child, a puritan sleeping with a prostitute for money thereby reciprocating the deal, and yet the plot completely lacks humor except for some skirmishes between the father and the rebellious daughter that usually ends up with a slap for the latter. The message is clear, the director has no intentions of mitigating any shock, and he rather wants to play with the effect of shock. The shock effect, the sensationalization, work in today’s media, so does it in the film, it has to, there is no harm in accepting the worst, it worked with the Slumdog Millionaire, albeit the difference of the issue, it works with Bol too.

            This movie also carries a subtle hint of position against the Capital punishment, an irreversible state sponsored crime. The lead character faces the threat of death penalty, there is an element of suspense until the end, the mystery angle being taken care of right in the beginning itself. The Bollywood habituated spectator awaits with the baited breath the last minute miraculous presidential pardon, and since in the real world miracle does not take place, it doesn’t, leaving the girl hanging at the gallows, leaving behind the message that a Capital Punishment eliminates all scopes of a justified debate as the subject is dead by the time the president decides to hold one. It also eliminates the possibility of resuscitating a victim in the case if he is found to be non-guilty 

            Cinema being a postmodernist medium to pass messages to the masses could be used as catalyst to sensitize the masses. Films like this one and Oh My God have a far bigger reach than books like No God in Sight or the Reluctant Fundamentalist. This medium thus has a bright potential to liberate the mind by creating at least the minimum: a simulacra of what is right and worth fighting for.