The Rapist, to be released shortly in India, is a very special film. It is Applause Entertainment’s second Hindi feature film and also Aparna Sen’s first Hindi film. It features Aparna’s daughter Konkona Sen Sharma as a rape victim.
Naina Malik (Konkona) has a supportive husband (Arjun Rampal) to manoeuvre their troubled marriage through the brutal act of sexual violation.The sensitive subject has been touched upon in the past in a Hindi film,Manik Chatterjee’s 1976 film Ghar in which the raped woman’s marriage is split wide open by the trauma.The film is remembered to this day for its fabulous music by Rahul Dev Burman, and nothing else. Rekha spent most of the screen space looking with smouldering self pity into wide open spaces with her makeup refusing to fade even though she played a deeply disturbed woman.
Konkona Sen Sharma in The Rapist is all there. She is so invested in her role that at times it feels like we are watching a woman being sucked into the vortex of an existential crisis from which no therapy can pull her out. She is deeply immersed in her character’s pain, and makes The Rapist the most significant film on the subject of rape in Indian cinema.
The Rapist is Aparna Sen’s sixteenth feature film .The Hindi language in The Rapist had to happen organically. Just as Aparna’s first film 36 Chowringhee Lane had to be in English because the protagonist was an anglo-Indian .The Rapist needed Hindi as the spoken language .
Earlier Aparna did a Hindi adaptation of Badal Sircar’s play in 2015 Sari Raat . But that was a short film.The Rapist is her first full-length Hindi feature film .Aparna doesn’t think language is an issue any more. However she did have an excellent Hindi dialogue writer Hussain Haidry for The Rapist.
Says Aparna, “The Rapist is my first full-length Hindi feature film .The language has to happen organically. My first film 36 Chowringhee Lane had to be in English because the protagonist was an anglo-Indian. Or Mr & Mrs Iyer one protagonist speaks Tamil the other Bengali. So which language should they communicate in. English, right?”
Aparna admits language is no longer an issue. “All films are subtitled in English.Also, our kind of films are rarely seen by rural audiences. The urban-rural divide among audiences has become really sharp.”