Vijay Sethupathi, Anurag Kashyap’s “Maharaja”, explores love through the stories of three fathers. But what about women’s agency?

Maharaja is a film that will keep you hooked throughout its entire 2 hours and 22 minutes. The slow disintegration of a man heartbreakingly trying to find his ‘stolen’ Lakshmi is truly gripping. Nithilan Saminathan’s screenplay for Maharaja is one of the best in recent times, yet the feeling remains that the core story of the film could have been handled with sensitivity. Unravelling the good, bad and ugly sides of Maharaja. *Spoiler alert* (Also Read: Maharaja movie review: Vijay Sethupathi excels in this thrilling tale of a desperate father)

A story of three fathers

If we look closely, Maharaja is defined by the decisions of three fathers out of love for their children. Every event in the film is determined by the decisions of these men.

Maharaja (Vijay Sethupathi) is a barber who lives an idyllic life until one day, the life of his child Jyothi (Sachana Namidass) is threatened in a burglary. The lengths he goes to for her seem hilarious at first, but become shocking as the film progresses. You know the meme where a father doesn’t express his love verbally, but you know it because he shows it through his actions? Think about it a hundred times.

Selvam (Anurag Kashyap) seems to sleep like a baby despite making bad decisions because his child Ammu will have the life she deserves. Selvam will not cross any boundaries on certain things, but he will look the other way as long as he gets what he wants for his daughter. Of course, this will soon come back to haunt him.

Morally questionable police inspector S. Varadharajan (Natarajan Subramaniam) is willing to break the rules if it means avenging a girl, as he himself has a daughter. When he realises what Maharaja is after, he can’t help but put himself in Maharaja’s shoes. Nithilan makes this clear by showing us that Varadharajan has a daughter of Jyothi’s age.

It’s the journey these three men take, regardless of where they stand on the moral compass, that will captivate you.

The strange case of Lakshmi

At the beginning of the film, Maharaja goes to the police station to report that Lakshmi has been stolen from his house. It soon emerges that Lakshmi is neither a human nor a pet – it is an old, battered dustbin. In a film as serious as Maharaja, Nithilan finds a way to inject humour. It is funny that a dustbin that saved a child from a freak accident is treated with such reverence.

But when Maharaja starts annoying the police with his persistence, you wonder if he is doing all this just because of a dustbin. Why would his house be ransacked just because of a dustbin? And then, of course, the laughter dies down when you see Nallasivam (Singampuli) disgustingly comparing a replica of Lakshmi to the smooth skin of a young girl. There is a parallel to how men treat women.

The underrated wives of the Maharaja

Much of Maharaja is about women paying the price for the choices men make, but the female characters in the film aren’t really given their due, as most of them lack agency.

Selvam’s life revolves around Kokila (Abhirami) and Ammu. But he lies to his wife every time she asks him where he gets enough money for their daughter. Maharaja’s wife Selvi (Divya Bharathi) exists only to portray her husband’s trauma. Let’s not even talk about why Aasifa (Mamta Mohandas) is in this story, only to be literally sidelined in scenes that have nothing to do with her.

While these under-played characters could be forgivable (they aren’t), the way Jyothi’s trauma is used as a plot device to justify Maharaja’s thirst for revenge is not. The explicit scene is played to shock more than anything else. Objectively speaking, is it the sign of a good script when the director can pull the rug out from under you even towards the end of the film? Sure.

But after watching Maharaja and seeing Selvam get what he deserves, you are left with the nagging feeling that the end result could have been achieved without putting Jyothi through hell just for the sake of clarity.

Did Maharaja have to go so far?

We are shown that it doesn’t take much to provoke Maharaja about his daughter. A scene where he pleads, threatens and refuses to budge until a school principal apologises to Jyothi after falsely accusing her is the proof. Later, he does something similar at the police station. Does Maharaja, the man, the father, have to go that far? Probably not, but since when is parental love logical? One believes in the madness and love for one’s daughter.

However, the film could have handled Maharaja’s sexual assault a little more cleverly. Yes, Jyothi gets a scene where she refuses to let what happened define her (no other character gets that either). But did she even have to go through that for Maharaja to cause a bloodbath? Why do women (who even in fiction have no opportunities for escapism) have to pay the price in men’s wars?

As technically sophisticated as their films are and as compelling as they are in exploring the male psyche, the filmmakers clearly still have a long way to go before they tackle gender issues with sensitivity.