A Film a Week - Santosh

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

Like India itself, its cinema tends to be very diverse. The cultural diversity of the country itself powers the diversity of cinematic styles and schools, while also diversity genre-wise can be noted, from Bollywood spectacles and popular action flicks via highly artistic stuff, documentaries and docu-fiction to proper genre flicks like fantasies and horrors. Genre-mixing also occurs and when it is done smartly, the results can be very interesting. In the case of “Santosh”, the genres in the mix are procedural crime thriller and a naturalist social drama with certain documentary ambitions. The film premiered at Cannes’ Un certain regard and we were lucky enough to catch it at Zagreb Film Festival.

The titular protagonist played by Shahana Goswami is a widow of a police officer who was killed on duty. Her in-laws hurry to take her back to the family she came from, having her for a “cursed witch” who was somehow responsible for their son’s death, possibly still unable to reconcile with the fact that their marriage was not an arranged one. A lucky break happens to Santosh when she goes for a “compassionate appointment” scheme through which the widows (or widowers) of the police officers fallen on duty are offered training and constable position with the paycheck on top of their partner’s pension.

She accepts it and soon enough, even though she is not highly regarded by her male colleagues, she gets some respect from the community. Pursuing a path to help an illiterate Dalit man to file a missing person report for his teenage daughter, she soon enough stumbles upon her first murder investigation. The victim is the same girl whose missing her father tried to report and the primary suspect is a Muslim youngster from the village nearby, Saleem (Arbaz Khan) who tried to seduce her. Guided by her mentor Sharma (Sunita Rajwar of the “Stree” serial), Santosh uncovers how the system divided along the lines of gender, class, caste and religion really works in contemporary rural areas of Northern India. Newsflash: the idea of justice is merely a dream, the games of power and humiliation are played constantly and “railroading” the convenient suspect is quite a common practice in the police force so defunded that it is not able to conduct a proper investigation.

“Santosh” is a feature-length fiction debut for the British-Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri who previously made her name with two documentaries – “I for India” (2005) and “Around India with a Movie Camera” (2018) – in which she explored the country’s reality both after and before gaining independence from the British colonial rule. The documentarian background of the filmmaker can be observed both in her script that uses a relatively simple crime-thriller-”sunny noir” plot to explore the contemporary reality in its background and in her approach to directing in which she opts for naturalism through dimly lit hand-held shots in more actiony sequences contrasted with longer and calmer observational shots that try to depict ordinary life.

Both the cinematography by Lennert Hillege and the editing of Maxime Pozzi-Garcia deserve praise, and so does Suri’s work with the actors that are kept in various registers fitting for the types and the functions of the roles they play. For instance, Shahana Goswami is beautifully subdued as the protagonist who has to stand a lot of inner turmoil at her new job, and so is Arbaz Khan as the frightened suspect, while the actors who play the characters who provide the film with the concepts and ideas rather than emotional grounding are instructed to use broader strokes, which suits Sunita Rajwar and the rest of the cast members who play the figures of authority quite fine.

However, “Santosh” does not fare that well as a genre piece since its overall energy is much calmer from what the audience expects and the dynamic accents are not as strong as they should be for such a film. On the other hand, it is hitting the mark of a socially conscious and emotionally charged drama, a character study and a morality play. The end result is an art house flick that is extremely friendly with the festival-attending audiences.