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Vidya Balan in Tumhari Sulu and Jalsa. Shefali Shah in Jalsa. Bhumi Pednekar in Daldal. And now, in his new Netflix release, Maa Behen, Madhuri Dixit-Nene and Triptii Dimri. There is a very obvious question here waiting to be asked of the man that is known to cast some of the most capable women performers of our times in some of the finest feminist films of the last decade.
And Suresh Triveni doesn’t disappoint, clapping back with “You left Subedaar out,” referring to the lone man-fronted listing in his recent filmography. “As a filmmaker, you just reflect upon your own experiences. I look back and see one of my favourite filmmakers, Sai Paranjpye, doing a Chashme Buddoor (1981). You have someone like Zoya Akhtar, directing Zindagi Milegi Na Dobara (2012). Yes, we need a lot more women filmmakers, but what’s more important is that more stories with women as protagonists need to be told,” he says.But Suresh Triveni is a ladies' man.
Maa Behen, a comedy following a middle-aged woman and her daughters in the nosy neighbourhood of an Indian town, has rekindled the conversation around everyday sexism and female objectification in India. A single mother (Dixit-Nene) and her daughters (Dimri and Dharna Durga), assailed endlessly with small-town-style slander, slut-shamed and witch-hunted in the most casual manner. What Triveni, and writer Pooja Tolani’s script, do exceptionally well, is puncture the inactionable theory with frothy feminine irreverence. The rage is delivered with the pointed end of the butter knife that’s Dixit-Nene’s comic timing.
“I was greedy to have Madhuri Dixit back, centre and lead, because I think she’s one of the finest talents we have burdened with a lot of superstardom,” Triveni says, reluctant to comment on whether his lead star playing mum to a current actor could show a light to her male contemporaries on the art of shining in age-appropriate parts.
Dixit-Nene’s character wears a sleeveless blouse in the film, an object that has accumulated considerable shock appeal in the realm of Indian domesticity. An online take dismissed it as a “lazy way to stage conflict”, and Triveni, who reflects actively on the kind of things that are said about his work, suggests that the blouse be seen as a metaphor for “choice”. Simply because in most outcomes of sexism and patriarchy, that is what women are often denied.
“It’s a tool in the film, and it serves as one at a crucial moment in the film. And elsewhere, it really stands for a choice and is nothing literal,” he adds.
While on the subject of choices, Triveni makes quite a few interesting ones in Maa Behen, such as deploying a saturated colour palette and mise-en-scène that’s very obviously a set. “I could have done this in a real space and all, but I wanted a distinct character for my film to stand out personally. For the tones, my initial inspiration have been the illustrations that used to appear in all these Hindi magazines for women. The colours, the spaces, the way people behave in the film, all of it came from these magazines.”
And then, there are the self-implicating flashback scenes, upended later by Rashomonic expositions, exaggerated in a comic-book manner because they are all about rumours. “And rumours hardly have details. The absurdity you notice is a physical manifestation of all that exaggeration.”
This Gulzar-directed classic is a compulsory listing in the comedy-of-errors canon. Two pairs of identical twins, switched at birth, go on to create chaos—mistaken identities, wronged wives, baffled servants—in what remains the gold standard for Hindi farce.
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