A staple of the indie art film is the main protagonist looking over a scenic landscape, ruminating over a moral dilemma. While it can occasionally come across as contrived and bereft of purpose, Shahana Goswami, starring in Santosh, leaves the audience unnerved with her gazes; this is a film that covers familiar ground but does so in a sensitive manner.
Goswami plays a young widow who takes her late husband’s job as a police officer, maintaining the salary and allocated flat that comes with it, in the fictional Chirag Pradesh in north India.
Police procedural thrillers often provide a formula of character motivation, pointless bureaucratic obstruction, an ally or adversary within the police force and a large investigative case that encapsulates the rookie’s entry into the morally hazardous world. Santosh has all of these, but there is a subtlety in its transitions. It is a film that has immense staying power and makes you think.
Initially, Santosh perseveres against the police overlooking a low-caste father’s search for his teenage daughter. Santosh’s naiveté is quickly revealed as the discovery of the body amplifies tension in the community, and rather than applauded, she becomes an object of slanderous comments. She quickly realises there are no winners.
Shortly after, we are introduced to the female inspector Sharma (the excellent Sunita Rajwar), a hardened veteran who is able to fluidly integrate herself into the all-boys culture while simultaneously mentoring Santosh, occasionally offering her gifts that appear halfway between kindness and ingratiation. This ethical murkiness continues when a young doting couple offers her a fistful of rupees to avoid escalating an issue. It elicits a small smile from her, one of the few in the movie.
Santosh seems to gather strength over time, becoming unafraid and unapologetic. Towards the end of the film we see her sitting in a restaurant, with a man closely watching her, breaking the unspoken code of how long we should look at others before a sense of discomfort arrives. When she notices the man, she quickly binge-eats her food, purposely heaving it out, forcing the man to look away from the grotesque scene.
Nearly every scene includes Goswami, but we’re always engaged, pondering what she will do next. Many of the themes of the film touch upon religion, caste and gender, but this is a distraction from where the heart of the film is: how people evolve. Santosh is initially seen as naive, and the female inspector Sharma as indifferent, but the film shows that people are not always what they seem.
International film festivals also continue to be drawn to police procedurals with Visaranai (Venice), Talvar (Toronto), Paatal Lok (Berlin) and most notably 2018’s Soni (Venice) and 2019’s Delhi Crime (Sundance). Santosh, first appearing in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, thrives due to the craftsmanship of British-Indian director Sandhya Suri. It has just played at the Toronto International Film Festival and has now been nominated as Britain’s entry to the Oscars.
Suri initially workshopped the story of Santosh at the 2016 Sundance Director’s Lab, incorporating her background as a teacher in Japan and a documentary filmmaker in countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti and Samoa. She continued her journey, working and learning with small Indian NGOs dealing with violence against women – especially the Nirbhaya case – and her attention to detail and curiosity is present in the film, most aptly in the cinematography and heart-pounding music.
While Cannes-darling Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light and Bollywood powerhouse Reema Kagti’s Superboys of Malegaon will capture the attention of the film circuit, Suri’s debut feature Santosh punches above its weight with its sensitivity and craft.
Roland Mascarenhas is an HR consultant and freelance writer. He splits his time between Toronto and Mumbai.
