Language: Hindi
The history of modern sport has been riddled with patriarchy’s efforts to define what constitutes feminine and who qualifies to be considered a woman, while also pressuring women players to offer themselves up as spectacles to please the male gaze.
In a New York Times article in 2016, journalist Ruth Padawer cited Susan K Cahn’s book, Coming On Strong: Gender and Sexuality in 20th-Century Women’s Sports, which quoted an International Olympic Committee member saying in the 1950s that he wanted to “be spared the unesthetic spectacle of women trying to look and act like men” at the Olympics. Over half a century later, BBC commentator John Inverdale made disparaging remarks about Marion Bartoli’s looks when she won the Wimbledon in 2013. This year, Norway’s beach handball team was fined in a European tournament for refusing to wear the microscopic bikini bottoms compulsory (at the time) for women in the game while men were allowed to wear shorts. And Indian athlete Dutee Chand had to go to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland to get back her right to compete as a woman, after tests in 2014 showed her testosterone levels to be above the level specified by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF).
Chand is not named in Rashmi Rocket, and the opening disclaimer clarifies that this new Hindi film is only “inspired by true events … a product of fictional writing”. Her trauma immediately comes to mind though while watching Taapsee Pannu play the story’s Rashmi Vira who blazes across the national and global athletics firmament before being thrown out of the Indian team for the same biological reason that was held against Chand.
Although testosterone is considered a male hormone, women too produce small amounts of it. Rashmi Rocket raises a point rarely heard in the Indian mainstream public discourse: that some women’s bodies naturally have more testosterone than is the norm and that for decades, sportswomen have been subjected to humiliating sex-testing that goes beyond mere injections and labs, and includes multiple assaults on their dignity, to determine whether or not they fit a rigid definition of “woman”.
Society and medicine have evolved to a stage where accepted classifications of gender and sex are not as inflexible as they once were. Rashmi Rocket’s achievement lies in its exploration of a little-known subject through storytelling that maintains a surprisingly light touch till the finish line without ever trivialising its weighty concerns. The film avoids many of the extreme complexities in the discussion on gender – the word “intersex”, for instance, never comes up – but it does demand a rethink on what “natural” means.
Pannu is an interesting choice for this role because though she fits conventional notions of an athletic body, and she runs like a real runner would, she is a stark contrast to Chand who is famously short. The actor plays Rashmi as an inscrutable young woman who only sometimes allows emotion to show on her face, thus giving her occasional bursts of pain and anger a particularly explosive effect.
Her teammates, including her bête noire, are not written with the detail that gave Chak De! India and Lagaan their iconic status, but other supporting characters in Rashmi Rocket are made memorable by writers Nanda Periyasamy (story), Aniruddha Guha (screenplay) and Kanika Dhillon (additional screenplay and dialogues). The best-written among them – better written, unfortunately, than even the leading lady or the relationship between a rival athlete and her father – is Rashmi’s trainer, boyfriend and later husband, Gagan Thakur.
Priyanshu Painyuli plays Gagan with such a careful blend of stoicism and restrained mischief, and with such commitment to the physicality of an Armyman, that he is unrecognisable from the totally wacko fellow he did with great spark in Bhavesh Joshi Superhero. The romance between Rashmi and Gagan is sweetly done.
Rashmi’s lawyer (Abhishek Banerjee from Stree, Paatal Lok, Ankahi Kahaniya) at first looks set to go the way of the popular bumbling-lawyer-backing-the-underdog cinematic trope. But Banerjee tweaks the template enough to keep the audience guessing as much as his character’s foes about whether he is indeed nervous and ill-prepared or trying to throw them off.
It might appear then that Periyasamy and his colleagues are more comfortable with male characters, yet they serve up a surprise with the writing of the judge in the case when Rashmi takes her athletics federation to court. It helps of course that Supriya Pilgaonkar is lovely as Judge Savita Deshpande, though I am not sure what we are supposed to make of one seemingly sensible character’s declaration that “hard facts”, not feminism, work with this lady, thus suggesting that feminism rests on something other than facts. Oh c’mon! It’s 2021. Do better than that.
Akarsh Khurana’s calling card as a director so far has been Karwaan starring Irrfan, Mithila Palkar and Malayalam cinema’s matinee idol Dulquer Salmaan making his Hindi debut. Khurana keeps Rashmi Rocket engaging and thought-provoking throughout, even when the writing does not necessarily display the depth that the theme called for.
Without resorting to caricatures, the screenplay does well with the depiction of the media’s largely ill-researched and sensationalist but once in a way level-headed reporting on Rashmi’s case, but the film shows a lack of commitment to itself by confining its moments of journalistic sobriety to India TV. Yes yes, I get it, there is probably a brand partnership involved and the creative team was probably not given a say in this. Whatever be the case, India TV represents the worst that the country’s news channels have become in the past two decades, so I had to control my laughter when it is shown platforming serious, well-informed discussions soliciting support for Rashmi.
One of the points likely to come up after this film’s release is the disparity between the lives of the real Dutee Chand and the fictional Rashmi Vira. Crucially, Chand is from an impoverished background and is openly lesbian. Rashmi is middle class, the daughter of an influential community leader (played by Supriya Pathak) and heterosexual. Telling Chand’s story faithfully might have been more challenging especially within a commercial format, but the other way of looking at Rashmi Rocket is that Rashmi Vira – and Taapsee Pannu – completely defy whatever stereotypes are likely to come to mind when a conservative society is told that a woman has more testosterone levels than most do. So yes, there are certain dimensions that could have been examined if this had been Dutee Chand’s biography, but in departing from it, the writers have added other dimensions that also deserve focus. Without giving away spoilers let’s just say that one turn of events late in the storyline shines a light on the remarkable feats the female body is capable of at every stage in life, contrary to pre-conceived notions; and instead of perpetuating a stereotype of ideal womanhood, that turn of events is turned on its head and used by Rashmi and her lawyer to ask a question about which precise bodily function ultimately qualifies as being the defining characteristic of the female in the human species.
And so with all its imperfections (including some unsatisfactory visual effects in the sporting arena and a superfluous, clichéd song and dance scene), Rashmi Rocket ends up being provocative, convincing in its plotline about politics in India’s sporting establishment and entertaining.
Here for a change is a Hindi film that knows how to portray male allies without allowing them to cross the line into male saviour territory. Here for a change is a Hindi film featuring female adversaries sans the all-women-are-enemies-of-women stereotype, and spotting female allies in unexpected places.
(Spoiler alert for this paragraph) Disappointingly, despite its boldness elsewhere, Rashmi Rocket follows the Hindi film tradition of avoiding even a mention of abortion in a situation in which, in real life, it would have at least come up in passing. (Spoiler alert ends)
I do wish Rashmi Rocket had dwelt at length on caste and class privilege while assessing the “level playing field” that athletics federations long claimed they hoped to achieve for women by eliminating women athletes with high testosterone levels from competitions. Still, the film ends up planting the seeds of other thoughts in the audience’s minds, including the realisation echoed by what Bruce Kidd, a former long-distance Olympic runner, told NYT, “that Olympians themselves sometimes joke that they’re all freaks of nature”. What then is “normal” and “natural”? That Rashmi Rocket raises that question and sustains a conversation on it right till the end makes it a commendable and significant film.
Rashmi Rocket is streaming on ZEE5.
Rating: ***
(Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad)
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