Official Trailer:

Gargi and Jana Gana Mana has similar threads, searching for truth in a pile of different viewpoints, and mobs vying for blood. While I found both movies to be engaging with their narration and screenplay, Gargi has an edge over Jana Gana Mana, comes out ahead with its realistic portrayal, avoids melodrama, and a better cinema with an engaging and gripping screenplay. Our perspectives are driven by emotion or logic. Many a times emotional perspective is in conflict with logic. Emotional perspective is driven by our lived experiences, prejudices, media, and social consensus (majority opinion). Logical approach requires us to look at something from different angles, be wary of logical fallacies and get to the truth. We can’t be just driven by one point of view even if it ends up being the right one.

In Jana Gana Mana, the lawyer is up against public/popular opinion to unravel the truth in the courtroom peeling the layers. In Gargi, the protagonist Gargi (an outstanding performance by Sai Pallavi) has to go against popular opinion to prove the innocence of her father who has been accused of sexual abuse. She has to win over the Concorde fallacy, if I can apply that to the situation here, what does she do when the image she has constructed about her father from her childhood gets challenged. Gargi has to introspect her perspective and come to terms with the truth. This conflict adds so much depth, layers to the story and what it tries to convey.

Character arc of Gargi is one of the best I have seen lately. The approach of jumping between two timelines, one current focusing on court proceedings and another from Gargi’s past is an excellent choice by the director, Gautham Ramachandran. It helps us to get to know Gargi, reason behind her perspective, why she fails to look at other possibilities even when Indrans, the lawyer (another excellent performance by Kaali Venkat), says he needs to analyze it from multiple angles. Second viewing is much more enriching than the first one now that we view the same scenes differently. For example, the Gargi’s expression when she turns to watch the breaking news at school, when she chides her sister to come back home before it gets dark, not to wear yellow color dress, and her behavior at the prison when she meets her father.

Thanks to the director for avoiding the melodrama what with so many opportunities to amplify the emotions, and hysteria. Director goes for cinematic language of visually showing how the family gets isolated by the public, the trauma Gargi feels at the court premises when the crowd goes after her dad, the ray of hope during the power cut scene, to call out a few. Even two simple shots of how the three characters are seated in an auto gives clues to Gargi’s state of mind. Shots, and sound design convey the feelings the characters go through. There are good number of scenes with no dialogues, but we fully get the context and can imagine what could have conspired. When we do get dialogues, they are crisp and hard-hitting: I have nothing in hand to lose something; Because I know the arrogance of a man and the pain of a woman, I am best suited to decide this; trust time and fate but you don’t have confidence in me…because I am not a boy. The supporting cast have also done a wonderful job. A special nod to Saravanan, the man who portrays the father of the victim and Sudha.S who plays the trans-woman judge. Thought has has gone in choice of character names too: Gargi, Akshara, Bennix Jayaraj, Deakins Rogers.

Gargi gives us two lenses to analyze the situation: approach of logic Vs approach of emotion. A person is full of multitudes. A man can be an affectionate father, loving husband, and a responsible son…and he can be a sexual assaulter too. These are not mutually exclusive, meaning a sexual assaulter can be father of two loving daughters. The term I am a father of a daughter too is flippantly spoken in the movie on different occasions to show how this sentiment gets exploited. All the more reason for us to see the case from multiple angles.