Movies don’t always need to have a message. Themes are inherent to storytelling, but there are plenty of movies that can simply coast on vibes and star power, or which undermine their own messaging when it gets heavy-handed and preachy. The films that often get audiences really thinking are the ones that cushion that messaging in a mesmerizing story, which don’t tell you what to think but what to think about. Writer and director Sandhya Suri’s debut feature, “Santosh,” premiering at Cannes, is one such film.
“Santosh” is named after its lead character, Santosh Saini — a young widow unaccustomed to working but is now forced to by necessity, who inherits her husband’s profession due to a bizarre legal loophole (a real clause known as “appointment on compassionate ground”). Overnight, Santosh finds herself thrust into the local police force, where a murder investigation becomes a crash course in the true law of the land.
It’s here, in society’s subtle machinations and mediations, that Suri’s film thrives. Santosh is inundated with the swirl of sexism, corruption, politics, casteism — all hot-button issues in India, if not worldwide, but none of them mentioned by name. In the “rural badlands” of the film’s setting, the only true -ism is survival, fueled by any manner of morally gray resourcefulness. Away from the Western gaze and academic lens, these ills take on new faces, and Santosh herself isn’t immune as it coincides with her first taste of independence.
This is probably the time to disclose that I’ve known Goswami for my entire life. We are allegedly cousins, but distantly enough that the connection has been explained repeatedly but I’ll never remember it (I just say our mothers are close friends). Back when she was a cool teen during one of my India visits, she told me she wanted to be an actor, and I remember how excited I was at the prospect as we spent the rest of our day singing and dancing to Bollywood songs on TV.
I never asked Goswami if the actors on that TV were the ones she wanted to emulate, but it’s hard to imagine a world where she did. Like so many performers (especially women) who don’t fit into mainstream Hindi cinema’s suffocating archetypes, her commercial roles were as the daughter, the wife, the best friend — solid performances to be sure, but not the main event. And yet Santosh is more relatable than any glamorous heroine, an ordinary woman whose newfound grief and solitude intertwine with incremental recognition of life’s daily evils. It’s another skillful turn in a career full of them, her filmography populated by female talent and smart creative choices — and she carries the film with ease.
Many of the injustices that unfold (during a slightly drawn-out two hours) rely on Santosh’s reaction; officers laugh at an illiterate man, medical assistants refuse to touch a Dalit girl’s dead body, slurs are hurled at a Muslim boy whose suspected crime has nothing to do with his religion — all of it reflected in Goswami’s eyes as Santosh registers, processes, internalizes her surroundings. She thinks she has an ally in senior officer Sharma (Sunita Rajwar), who has her own methods for maintaining the status quo. “There are two types of untouchables in this country,” Sharma tells her (one of the rarerly explicit lines in the film). “Those who no one wants to touch, and those who can’t be touched.”
As magnetic as Goswami and Rajwar are together, I found myself glued to the background actors. There’s no Western analog for how massive India’s population is; while cities and industries boom on a global level, there are still plenty of people mostly removed from technology, modernization (or the above -isms). The very nature of casting a reasonably educated professional actor as a poor villager instantly dilutes the authenticity, while bringing a camera crew into a community that isn’t used to it presents its own set of challenges (something also masterfully negotiated in the Oscar-nominated “To Kill a Tiger”). Suri’s film is full of non-actors who excel at being themselves in front of the camera, the result so eminently watchable because it feels so remarkably like the real India.
With “Santosh” screening in the festival circuit, I hope it gets the widest release possible, that it somehow reaches its very subjects. There is no change — major, fundamental, societal change, not just the shouts and actions of those with power and privilege — without the Santoshes of the world. I hope they get to watch it, and that like their namesake, they leave feeling changed.
Grade: B
“Santosh” premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
