Jeo’s film starred Nimisha Sajayan as a wife weighed down by housework, male entitlement, prejudice against menstruation, and sexual aggression in a patriarchal, upper-caste home in Kerala. It was set against the backdrop of the Supreme Court ruling on entry for women to the Sabarimala temple. Defensive responses to TGIK were drowned out by nationwide praise for its courage and acute observations of everyday realities. The irony in the anger against Mrs is that it’s a vastly diluted remake, lacking the courage, depth, nuance, and political awareness of TGIK.
Take the mother-in-law in Mrs. She has zero personality, even less screen space, and is eventually reduced to just another cliched evil saas through a snarky comment she makes about her bahu. In TGIK though, the ‘ammaayiyamma’ and ‘marumakal’ bond over their struggles, and the latter turns to the older woman for advice. Mean mothers-in-law certainly do exist. But they are not the only kind of mother-in-law. TGIK urged us to see beyond the stereotype.
Several meaningful visual motifs in TGIK are mindlessly modified in Mrs. This includes the lingering wide and long shots of a dirty kitchen and dining table that made the Malayalam film so hard-hitting. These shots are watered down in Mrs, possibly for aesthetic reasons.
Unsurprisingly for the risk-averse Hindi industry, Mrs completely skips Sabarimala, which was an essential ingredient even in the otherwise tepid 2023 Tamil remake of TGIK. Justifying this scripting choice by saying that Sabarimala would not resonate with North Indian viewers amounts to a literal interpretation of the original film. The idea was/is not to fixate on X or Y temple (incidentally, the North has similar examples), but to underline the link between religion and patriarchy.
Mrs also takes gingerly steps around caste issues that were handled with clarity and openness in TGIK. The heroine’s relationship with her dalit household help, for one, was crucial to the Malayalam script, but is pared down in the Hindi retelling. Through conversations and song, Jeo indicated the prevalence of casteism in society at large, not merely in the heroine’s marital home. In Mrs, however, a passing remark by the domestic help is about untouchability being a problem in this specific family. It’s a subtle, comforting assurance to those persons of privilege in the audience who might be willing to acknowledge the existence of caste oppression – so long as it is attributed to someone other than themselves. Such as the family in Mrs. Combine this with the decision to assign names to the characters in Mrs. Jeo left his characters nameless, the point being that the film was not about them in particular, but about a social milieu in general in which patriarchy, caste and religion intersect.
With so many elements trimmed or deleted, Mrs is little more than the story of an overworked, under-appreciated wife.
For the record, the family in Mrs is infuriating despite the toned-down script, and Sanya Malhotra is excellent as the lead. In comparison with the Malayalam film though, this remake is anodyne and superficial.
What made TGIK iconic is that, unlike Mrs, it was designed to be discomfiting and demand introspection from everyone watching it. It was not made to reassure us that you and I can view ourselves as far removed from the fictional people it portrayed.
