Happy endings

In Vikramaditya Motwane's Udaan, the central character journeys to adulthood across an emotionally stark landscape inhabited mostly by men. At the end, he takes on a rather different manhood than conventionally defined. Returning his father's eighteenth birthday present, a watch, symbolic of discipline and hidebound convention, he leaves home taking along his little half-brother. He chooses, not blind duty but freedom and love -- and the responsibilities these require. Exhausted by his pain, we are relieved at this hopeful ending.

This happy ending rings truer because it's far from neat. It does not leave us with that sugary marshmallow moral: it's all about loving your family. It recognises that some people fear change and blame their unhappiness on tradition. In fact, happiness is a choice of the unknown path made with courage and uncertainty. It's a relief that a Hindi film looks at middle-class and small-town life with clear-eyed humanity. That such a film could be released despite a film culture devoted to mediocrity, feudality and slavery to clothes is the happiest ending.

Despite its happy ending, the film has an overall air of tragedy. Though I rejoiced at the brothers' flight from the oppressive, heartless regime of a father they called Sir, I was left with a deep sadness as that father, shutting the door to his house, retreated into his cage. The moment was heavy with the knowledge that no matter how many times he remarried or what successes came his way, this man would never be able to leave this cage of masculinity that society had given him, even though it made him completely alone and lonely.
Our films tend to glorify masculine aggression -- whether in villains or women --u00a0 and to sentimentalise men's pain -- caused by villains or women -- never questioning that it must be so. Men drink, weep, fight and conquer -- no mixed feelings allowed. Udaan is rare in examining the emotional lives of men -- the confusion and difficulty in aspiring to reach ideal manhood, which unfolds as violence to others, but also to oneself.



Ronit Roy portrays the father with such wonderfully compacted anger and anguish -- it's not easy to hate him even when he's hateful, because the film lays bare the system he is both upholder and a victim of: in which men must be strong, silent and successful in hitting the muscular milestones of degrees, sex and salaries. To need others, to allow oneself the weakness of love, which after all sometimes makes us lesser than those we love, is to be a loser -- and the fear of being seen as a loser, overrides all else and all sense, imprisoning us.

Of course things have changed -- but ideas of ourselves as men and women run deep for all of us. While feminism helped women to question their conditioning, men have been less successful in seizing this opportunity -- struggling instead with anxiety and shame as also the expectations of others, including the women in their lives. We all know how difficult it is to leave our familiar prisons, to shrug off the habitual weight of conditioning.

That Udaan turns a feminist eye on the male experience is a thing to celebrate -- the compassion with which it looks at the fragility of men, is something we can all afford to cultivate along with our critique of masculinity -- men most of all towards themselves. The happiest endings allow the release of long pent-up, tightly-held suffering.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer, teacher and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevi.com