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There’s something about Janhvi Kapoor’s protagonists existing within microcosms of male privilege. Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl, Roohi, Good Luck Jerry, Mili, Bawaal, Mr. & Mrs. Mahi… the list goes on. Her filmography is built upon the predicament of her being the hunted — her plight symbolic of an echo chamber of conflated egos and gendered hegemonies that are examined through the lens of male directors and, as a consequence, the male gaze. Watching Ulajh then is an experience that is both familiar and fresh. Kapoor continues to be perpetrated against, but unlike some of her lesser works, Sudhanshu Saria’s film understands the micro-moments of female rage that inform this experience.
Unlike the exploitative Bawaal, her circumstances here are congruous with the gaze through which her character is examined. Suhana Bhatia isn’t burdened by the baggage of continual smartness that most contrived spy thrillers superimpose upon their protagonists. She messes up more often than not — she takes longer than usual to look in the direction of a suspected sniper. She extends her gaze for longer than necessary while amateurishly tracking an agent... Yet, her RAWness (apologies) is framed not so much as a weakness but as a key definer of her humanity. These second-long deliberations on Saria’s end are constructs that are fleeting, yet essential, in elevating Ulajh from a standard spy thriller to a starkly feminist reclamation of agency.
The people next to me kept exclaiming: “Is she dumb?” When I wasn’t seething with annoyance at them, I thought to myself: “What else could she have done?” It’s a beguilingly simple, and even simplistic, examination of a film that transcends sweeping notions of morality, but it’s also perennial because few filmmakers of the subgenre choose to ask it. In the pursuit of crafting intelligent films, we often forget to root them in the stupidity of human immediacy. As a result, Kapoor’s transition from the hunter to the hunted is quite a sight — a nicely eschewed meta-commentary on her ever-evolving filmography that also provides enough cheap thrills to keep you seated.
Even her gradual descent into the titular Ulajh invokes empathy, not contempt, because her stakes are designed within inherently male models of power. You hear them in casually sexist remarks, in which it is implied that upward mobility among high-ranking female officials crosses through the beds of several men. But more importantly, you see it in Kapoor’s implosive turn: Suhana is reacting much more than she is acting, but the actor’s increasingly feral rhythm — notice how the cadence of her voice changes as she becomes all too aware of what she’s now entangled in — gives the film heft and a feminist identity which its screenplay doesn’t entirely do justice to.
Kapoor is always a step ahead of the film, to both its benefit and detriment. She’s supported by a terrific ensemble, but her dynamic with a tonally inconsistent Gulshan Devaiah serves not so much to smoothen over the film’s cracks as it does to expose them. In an early scene where Devaiah’s Nakul Sharma cascades through the Indian Embassy, haunting Kapoor’s character, his stalking is pitched at a level which invokes more irritation than dread. I wondered if the hamming was intentional; is the grammar of something as horrific as blackmailing rooted in a tone not dissimilar from that of... a belligerent boy asking his mother for ice cream? The creative choice that propelled the question might not have been entirely convincing, but it’s also why I enjoyed the film as much as I did — because it made me think in a way that few Hindi films this year have.
It’s also, then, a metaphor for a crossroad that the film treads — one that encapsulates the plight of Hindi cinema as it is today. Ulajh is seminal because it’s representative of a rapidly waning subgenre: the mid-budget female-led thriller. It’s a subgenre that has inspired some of the greatest Hindi cinema of the past decade: Raazi, Neerja, Kahaani, Kapoor’s own Mili. However, it’s also seminal because of a threat that its climax clearly elucidates: the franchise set-up model that plagued the conclusions of many-a-great thriller. It’s almost a cue for art giving way to the constraints of capitalism on a level so visual it is almost primal. It’s that fine line which separates pre-lockdown Hindi cinema I have loved and grown up on and the commercial constraints of a post-pandemic world. Don’t get me wrong: there is nothing I want more than a kickass female-led spy thriller franchise, but the climactic set-up is done in a manner so tonally bereft from the rest of the film that, for a moment, it threatens to derail the entire work. That is the constraint that Ulajh is both fighting against and a victim of. It’s also why it warrants your attention, and your money. It’s intelligent but never convoluted, and it rekindled a sense of hope in me — for women, for cinema, and for women in cinema. In times like this, I think I’ll take that.
Rating: 3.5 stars
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