Priyanka Chopra in a still from Vishal Bhardwaj's 7 Khoon Maaf.
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7 Khoon Maaf: When Vishal Bhardwaj anointed Priyanka Chopra India’s Promising Young Woman
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Among the many flaws of Greta Gerwig’s new Barbie movie, the most foundational one is the depiction of Barbieland as a matriarchal society — essentially an unequal world. The satire would’ve been far more effective had Ken turned into a villain without having any reason to; if the tiniest exposure to the ‘benefits’ of patriarchy had convinced him, purely out of selfish spite, to subjugate the women around him. By positioning him as one of the downtrodden, the movie risks transforming him into a revolutionary.
Like Barbieland, the heightened reality of Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2011 film 7 Khoon Maaf is an illusion as well. It presents a world more closely resembling our own; a world in which women are fooled into thinking they’re equal to men, and men are convinced that women are on a mission to usurp their power. The film’s heroine, an Anglo-Indian woman named Susanna Anna-Marie Johannes (played by Priyanka Chopra) goes on a murderous spree that spans decades, but crucially, each kill is preceded by an almost naïve desire to find love. Susanna encounters a revolving door of men in her life — the film is a Bildungsroman of sorts — only to discover that they’re all essentially evil. We don’t see the red flags because she doesn’t either.
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In an early scene, we are told that Susanna keeps pet snakes at the bottom of a well in her ancestral home in Goa, alluding perhaps to the new avatars that she dons after every chapter in this episodic film. Here’s how it goes: Susanna meets a new man, falls in love, gets married, and is then subjected to some form of abuse or another. To get out of the situation, she stages their murder with the assistance of her three ‘guardian angels’, leaving a trail of dead husbands in her wake.
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But somewhere around the halfway mark, the shock of finding herself with another creep wears off, and Susanna becomes more hardened, and significantly less passive as a character. She doesn’t start revelling in the revenge — that would’ve been a moral mistake on the film’s part — but she certainly doesn’t hesitate before pulling the trigger either; on one occasion quite literally. Considering its themes and structure, it’s interesting to note that both Lars von Trier’s two-part Nymphomaniac movies and Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman were released some years after 7 Khoon Maaf. But it doesn’t have the nihilism of those films — if anything Bhardwaj actively rejects the notion of punishing Susanna for her indiscretions. If anything, it believes that she suffered enough already. Quentin Tarantino would be proud.
And she really has. A good lawyer could probably get her off on grounds of self-defence. It’s called 7 Khoon Maaf, after all. Susanna never kills for pleasure. In fact, her first murder is triggered not by violence against herself, but against Goonga, a man who, along with Usha Uthup’s character, becomes an accomplice of sorts as the years go by. But as dour as all this might sound, the movie is often very playful. A song lyric describes Susanna as ‘bili jaisi aankhon wali ek meow ladki’, while another of her accomplices, Ghalib, is described in Vivaan Shah’s narration as, “Naam se shayar, kaam se butler, dil se Hindi filmon ke villain.”
The movie was sandwiched between Bhardwaj’s magnum opus — the trilogy of Shakespeare adaptations that will probably remain his most admired contribution to cinema. But 7 Khoon Maaf was ahead of its time in many ways. It pre-dates Barfi, the movie after which Chopra came to be recognised as a formidable actor and not just a pretty face. It was a true dark comedy, but more than anything else, it feels like a distillation of the anger that was felt so viscerally across the world during the #MeToo movement a full half-decade after its release.
7 Khoon Maaf is also a shining example of the sheer ambition that mainstream Bollywood encouraged in the not so distant future, ambition that has sadly evaporated these days. During this time, big studios were taking big swings, and more often than not, succeeding. Also released in 2011, the raunchy comedy Delhi Belly somehow made it past the Rs 100 crore mark. A year later, Anurag Kashyap debuted his two-part gangster epic Gangs of Wasseypur; Sujoy Ghosh released the film Kahaani, which cemented Vidya Balan as a star; Reema Kagti unveiled the ghost story Talaash; and Dibakar Banerjee delivered the political thriller Shanghai. Those were the days. There’s no room for movies like this in the theatrical marketplace any more. Each of these directors, including Bhardwaj himself, has now embraced streaming.
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Read more | Satya: How Ram Gopal Varma’s genre-defining classic stood the test of time
It’s difficult to imagine a two-and-a-half hour revenge movie with no traditional song-and-dance sequences, an aggressively offbeat tone, and overt feminist themes doing the kind of business that 7 Khoon Maaf did back in 2011. But the movie hasn’t aged one bit; if anything, its rage feels more relatable than reactionary in 2023.
Post Credits Sceneis a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters. Because there’s always something to fixate about once the dust has settled.
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