Sitting side by side for lunch at school, a teenage girl and a teenage boy, very much in love, talk about their future. They will go to the same college, join the same workplace, and get married. It is all distant dreamy faces for both of them until then. That’s when the boy talks about ‘babies’. The smile on the girl disappears, she says no, she will not give birth. The boy drops the egg of his puff quite symbolically and announces, ‘without the egg, the puffs are no good’.
That scene and that line of the high school girl in a script he got is what caught Jude Anthany Joseph’s attention. Every time he decides to make a film, there is one such line that catches his fancy, and some intuition telling him that it will work. For his latest OTT film Sara’s, the line about a girl not wanting to be a mother somehow stuck with him.
“I knew the risks. I knew how in our society we talk about women becoming complete only once they attain motherhood. I also knew I didn’t want to hurt anyone – couples yearning for kids or people who are happy parents. That’s why we decided to tell the story light-heartedly,” says Jude, who has just had the time to finally charge his phone which has been ringing nonstop, with colleagues and well-wishers calling him to say he did a good job with Sara’s.
Jude had relied on his instincts for both of his previous films – the celebrated Ohm Shanthi Oshana and the second film Oru Muthassi Gadha. They have been contrasting films in that one told a coming-of-age story while the other had two elderly women at its centre. “For Ohm Shanthi Oshana, the line that caught my attention was the girl, who was ready to propose to a school crush, suddenly falling for an older man and telling herself, it had the coolness of snowfall. In Muthassi Gadha it was that line about an old woman going after her dreams, age not stopping her, and her wanting to hit the man who had once given her hope and disappeared from her life,” Jude says.
In all three films, he has chosen to tell the story from a woman’s perspective. Women of different ages, positions, mentalities. One in no way similar to the others. Nazriya as Pooja Mathew is your teenager falling in love, and sticking to it for years, an easygoing, easily likable young person. Rajini Chandy in Muthassi Gadha is the opposite, rude and unlikeable, with a string of suppressed dreams and untold wounds of the mind. Anna Ben as Sara is neither of these – she is your young passionate woman, very sure about herself; and knowing what she wants in life, pursues it relentlessly.
“It’s not that I get it right all the time. I get angry and sometimes bluntly say things that would be all wrong. My mother or sister, wife or friends might have all heard me say anti-women things to them. But in my mind, I don’t see them as a separate species because they are women. I treat men and women the same way, giving them both the same respect, putting neither above the other. That’s how my younger sister and I were raised – if I am wrong, she has absolutely no qualms about telling me off,” Jude says.
Watch: Trailer of Sara's
Sara is also blunt like him, blurting out what goes on in her mind regardless of who hears it. Anna Ben essayed that role beautifully – Jude knows. “It is probably the first protagonist who never changes through the course of a film, even as other characters around her change and evolve. And I knew Anna could do it beautifully.”
He chose her real life father and scriptwriter Benny P Nayarambalam to play the on-screen dad. “I knew him more than Anna. And they have both been so professional on the sets. Sometimes he would say Anna was too natural and his antics seemed dramatic. But I am most happy about casting Sunny Wayne for Jeevan (the male lead). It had to be a mature guy but one who is also irresponsible. Sunny surprised me with his performance,” Jude adds.
But the bulk of the film revolves around Sara, and Jude admits that it is not easy to understand what goes on in the mind of women. However, he goes on to say that it can be true of most people, regardless of gender.
“It was not easy for me to address this subject (of reproductive rights) in Sara’s. If you notice, I never use the word abortion in the film. I don’t have even the doctor (Siddique) specify it – instead he talks about parenting. How if you can’t be good parents, you shouldn’t be parents at all,” Jude says.
Still from Sara's
Incidentally, he began work on the film last June, when he was expecting his second child – a daughter born in July.
But even as he didn’t want to cause offence, he wanted to stand up for the rights of women – for he says personal freedom is as important as breathing. “No one has the right to tell you how to live your life.”
He believes awareness can come at any point in life. He admits to having been transphobic in his early years but becoming aware of the rights of trans people, “which should be the same as anyone else”, later in life.
Jude has a take on the Me Too movement too, which is indirectly expressed in Sara’s. Sara, who is approaching producers with her script, faces different kinds of reactions – from outright indifference to lecherous advances. She slaps the lecherous guy on the spot when he asks for sexual favours. Another man, who had been very sweet to Sara and accepted her script on the spot, later turns out to be an accused in a Me Too allegation. You see Sara falling desperately into her couch as the television news says that the woman had come out with the allegation 12 years after the incident.
“I believe #MeToo is a very good movement, it is great that the victims of abuse who could not at one time react, have now the space to speak up. However, I don’t agree with adult women remaining silent when they have the option to say no to an offer of work that demands sexual favours, and years later, alleging that they were wronged. I understand if you are in a helpless situation, where you are trapped. I have had bad experiences of my own,” Jude says.
Although women have time and again spoken about why it is not easy to respond to sexual harassment with a slap always as shown in the film, and experts too have pointed out that victims process trauma differently, Jude is convinced about his view. The movie shows Sara slapping a perpetrator at the workplace, but it does not dwell on how women can be sidelined and denied work opportunities for speaking up.
However, Jude has a more empathetic view about child abuse. He speaks about a time when he was a child of nine and a neighbour with a grudge against his family burnt his hand with a cigarette butt. No one had believed him then, he says. But when he saw the man again as a lad of 15, he gave him a ‘nice tight slap’. “I don’t think that man knows why I suddenly beat him like that,” Jude says. Another time, an older man in a bus touched him inappropriately and Jude is still angry that he could not react back then, being a child.
Sara's is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.