The great Indian Kitchen (Movie Review and learnings)
The great Indian Kitchen is a Malayalam movie by Jeo Baby. Although it was clear that the movie was filming on low budget it expertly brings out the ideas and views of director clearly and loudly. He enlightens the suffering of each and every woman in our country with his tail.
Although the title suggests a topic relating to cooking, the film is actually about the women who owns those kitchens, the first few days of a newlywed in her new house, and the amount of work that goes into creating Indian traditional cuisine. Above all, it’s about the male-dominance or patriarchy that has long been prevalent in our culture, where women are oppressed and eventually forced to forget their particular ambitions and desires in their new homes.
In The Great Indian Kitchen, the wife has a seemingly simple objective: she wants an equitable relationship with her partner, one that allows her to have a meal with him, enclose in her own home. Because this is the story of the ideal Indian housewife, and so we are not given her name. Which strongly symbolises the protagonist as the voice for all her fellow suffering Indian housewives.
Each day she works, cooks, cleans, peels, chops, serves, cleans up after herself, sweeps, and mop the floor. He consumes food and she’s been thrown off her feet. He sits quietly, performing yoga — inhaling and exhaling. This momentous cycle keeps on repeating and repeating until she breaks down further in the movie.
The protagonist in the movie is suffering from so called ‘silent abuse’-
They have their wives do the simplest tasks such as finding and providing their slippers when they go out, reducing and looking them as nothing but a servant of the house. It’s one of many responsibilities and obligations that a submissive women carry out without question — to the uninitiated eye, it’s a subtle type of servitude. The film illustrates a distinct type of domestic violence that does not include explicit cruelty. They don’t raise their voice or raise an arm, yet they do inflict a profound harm. When the family’s workhorse, the mother-in-law, had to flee due to family problem, the wife assumes the role of chief servant. That’s when the cracks start to show — both literally and metaphorically.
The Great Indian Kitchen isn’t just powerful because of its subject matter. Through the cinematography of the film, director Baby captivates the spectator in the wife’s sorrow in a unique way. Consider the moment in which the wife stands at the kitchen’s door, staring at it a little longer than normal. She was a dancer in a prior in her life. Now she’s a homemaker who has to juggle pots and pans while dealing with a damaged drain pipe. The pipe represents a rift in her marriage to her spouse, unravelling like their marriage and being disregarded by him till the end.
Sajayan masterfully enacts the wife’s agony; it’s evident that she wants to escape out of this nightmare that she lived in, even if it’s just for a day. Thanks to subtle acting performance and limited background music, the film engages us in the scene and makes the movie more relatable to the audience thus builds a psychological contact between the spectator and the characters.
The film showcases the supposed stereotypes of a typical Indian women (housewife). It shows various problems that are faces my many Indian women each day. Reducing their partners just to a subject of pleasure and housework. The director also showcases the problem of Bodily Autonomy- Sex and Menstruation.
The woman’s body in TGIK is merely seen in as a pair of hands monotonously revolves between the dirty dishes and the stoves when not that a vagina is assumed to that be ready for their husband’s pleasure when she is not bleeding.