Kabali
This latest Rajini blockbuster gets a score of 4 from The Filminists (after much debate and heated argument). Read on for our opinions on what worked in the movie and what didn’t.
Does the movie pass the Bechdel test?
Nope, it doesn’t.
What percentage of speaking character roles are played by women?
Divya: I actually counted. There were about 24 named characters (I could have missed a couple more) and 5 were female- Kumudha, Meena, Yogi, Fateema who’s the school headmistress of sorts and Banu who was a minor character that asks for Kabali’s help on behalf of her son. So roughly 20%.
Is there at least one female character with her own narrative arc that is not about supporting a man’s story?
Avinash: Radhika Apte’s character definitely seems to display tremendous agency in her choices and is shown as brave and determined. But her role is kind of limited in the movie and she exists mostly to motivate Kabali.
Dhansika is a cookie cutter badass who happens to be related to Kabali and saves him. Her character was very boring and insipid to me.
I find it hard to really talk about anyone’s “career” in the movie, but while both Radhika Apte and Dhansika’s motivations were fleshed out, their ambitions really were not.
Divya: I think Kumudha, Yogi and Meena were fairly well fleshed out characters and got their own narrative arcs to the extent that is possible in a Tamil movie, especially a Rajini movie. There was a hint of Kumudha being an activist of her own accord but that was never really fleshed out. She was also shown to be pregnant for a major portion of the time that was on screen, not that that’s a bad thing. It just defaults to the woman as nourishing Earth mother stereotype. And it saddened me that at the end of the movie, she defined herself as Kabali’s wife above all else (Hey, I just survived a major attack on my life and spent the last 20 odd years traumatized and being shunted around as domestic help and at the end of it I still see myself as someone’s wife more than a survivor on my own terms). She was probably the only human character in the movie, considering everyone else seems to be a cold blooded sociopath killer.
Do the movies show women in positions of power?
Avinash: No
Harish: Power is subjective. There are women who have the ability to sway men in power, which I think is a lot more power than men enjoy, but this is super subtle. I think we, in the patriarchal world, tend to define “power” in very male-centric ways. If Chanakya was powerful, so was Radhika Apte. She is afraid of physical fights when someone lunges at her with a sword in hand, but she was the one who, even in the face of death, understands the importance of a powerful statement in the form of clothing worn in protest.
The woman who runs the school is super powerful and orders around the junkies and reforms them. The movie doesn’t “focus” on her but she is a strict teacher to young adults.
Divya: I’m going to go with yes for all the minor female characters who are shown playing school administrators and Yogi’s character, of course, that inherently has a lot of power. It definitely saddened me though that most of the other named female characters were essentially depicted as helpless and needing a man to save them (Banu, Meena, Kumudha).
It’s a fair point about a patriarchal view of power but we might want to look at if the kind of influence that women have on men that is usually portrayed in movies (and very often played out in real life) is really power. I think Chimamanda Adichie called it “bottom power” in her phenomenal TED talk on why we should all be Feminists.
Avinash: That woman who runs the school was not very memorable to me. Also have to handwave away the fact that she’s propping us Kabali as an idol. Then again, there were tons of unmemorable male characters. Maybe this is the face of true progress. Equal opportunity suck.
Is homosexuality and queerness portrayed accurately and sensitively?
Avinash: I can’t recollect any depiction of homosexuality or queerness.
Are female characters performing non-traditional gender stereotypes and roles?
Avinash: Yes. Though Dhansika’s character was pretty cookie cutter female badass — with short hair and tattoos. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s become almost a standard shorthand.
Harish: Dhansika’s character is an assassin. Radhika Apte orders her husband around, influences his decisions, and commands respect — considering she is based in the 70s, I think that’s quite a plus. There are some women shown to be taking drugs etc. — this is not necessarily a positive, but I liked how they were willing to do “anything” to get the drugs. That is a “choice” I suppose?
Bhavishya: I want to bring in intersectionality in our feminism. We’re shown how women in oppressed communities are vulnerable to exploitation and addiction — and how difficult circumstances affect women too. While a drug addiction impacts a male in a particular way, it impacts a woman from a lower economic class in different ways — from being abandoned to having to peddle your body to buy drugs. Yogi, also, her circumstances ended up pushing her to wielding guns and killing people for money at a young age.
Swaminathan: Yes. Both Radhika Apte & Dhansika enjoy rights and powers that any man would. Of course, only one of them chooses to exert power through physical prowess but it is a CHOICE. So, a definite YES to this question
Are male characters performing non-traditional gender stereotypes and roles?
Avinash: Not that I can recall.
Harish: They walk around in pink clothes all the time :D
Swaminathan: Again, gangster movie. “Everybody shoot somebody” is more or less the order of the day.
Are characters sexually objectified?
Harish: No!
Does the movie encourage/condone stalking and abusive behavior?
Swaminathan: It does not.
Damsels in distress?
Avinash: Kind of — in that Kabali’s wife’s murder is a major motivating factor, and later needs to be protected from the goons. But the surprise daughter is also a part of the effort to protect Apte’s character. Towards the end of the movie, Apte’s character and Dhansika’s character both openly face the villain and show that they aren’t afraid of him, as a kind of defiance and this again I think is pretty awesome because it shows that they aren’t consistently damsels in distress. So I think yes, there are damsels in distress — but it isn’t an intrinsic part of anyone’s character.
Harish: Women are not quite shown as damsels in distress. There are women who cannot do physical fights and there are some — I am not sure if the former falls into the “damsels in distress” bucket. There are other women too who are suggested to be in distress, but there is no man “saving” them really.
Divya: I’m going with yes. Meena needed saving from herself and only Kabali seemed to be able to do that. Kumudha wandered around lost for decades until Kabali (and her daughter helped find her), not to mention several scenes where she was held at knife/gun point. Banu came to Kabali to save her son. In all fairness, it is a Rajini movie and everyone in the movie sees Kabali as their savior and there is a princess in shining armor in addition to the usual prince, but that doesn’t negate the fact that the damsel in distress trope is pretty heavy handedly used.
Body/slut shaming?
Swaminathan: None.
Is queerness invalidated, tolerated, snubbed, or dismissed?
Harish: No!
What else did we think about the movie
Divya: The only thing I’d like to add is that it annoys me that Rajini continues to act with heroines closer to his daughters’ ages than his own. I don’t like the double standard that he gets to be as old as he is and play his age as well as a younger version of himself while Radhika Apte is as young as she is and has to age herself to the present day timeline. I couldn’t recall a single female character, even as an extra in random crowd scenes, that were close to Rajini’s age. If Kollywood (and let’s face it, every movie industry on Earth) was its own parallel universe, all the women would die at the age of 30.
Avinash: Another thing that stuck out to me was Dhansika’s character. Basically, give someone short hair, non Indian clothes and a gun and they become a badass. I guess it was a gangster movie, so not the worst sin. But it’s getting kind of tired. I think it’s because it’s a very limited way to portray powerful women on film. Just give them a gun and kick some ass and that’s it, work done. No need to put in any more work into the story.
Harish: There are a lot of ways you can portray powerful women, but “short hair” is simply a logical decision in this case. In the flashback scenes, she does have long hair. It’s when she decides to become an assassin that she cuts her hair off. I’d do that too to my female characters if I don’t want the hair to become loose and hinder my vision when am trying to take someone out in the middle of a crowd.
Avinash: It’s a little silly to think that long hair is such an encumberance. And wouldn’t an assassin need to blend in more? Honestly this debate seems a bit silly. I was just commenting that there seems to be a codified look for “female badass”. Not commenting if it made sense in story.
Divya: I agree that there is a codified look for female badass as there is for female villains. I quote this very old NYTimes article in saying “the naturalism of male characters has grown in inverse proportion to the realism in female characters.”
Avinash: There’s an elephant in the room in the form of the Fair and Handsome sponsorship. It’s messed up that whoever is involved in the film did not consider how utterly disgusting this is. Here is a hero who has built his entire image around being a “dark” hero, and Radhika’s character explicitly says she loves his complexion and wants to “smear his dark all over her”and then this film has tied up with Fair and Handsome. Really? Was it worth it? Was it really impossible for a Rajini movie to eschew this partnership?
Divya: Come on Rajini movies! Do better!
The Filminists review and score movies from a feminist point of view. We believe that movies and media do not adequately represent Indian women in all their complexity and nuances and believe this narrative should be changed. For more information on how we scored this movie, please see our framework. Disagree with us or think we’re doing cool work? Let us know in the comments!
