EXCLUSIVE! Arati Kadav on Sanya Malhotra’s ‘Mrs.’ and marital rape: ‘Mechanical sex…’ | Not Just Bollywood

In an exclusive interview with Firstpost, director of Mrs. Arati Kadav says that being a woman didn’t want to show the horrors of everyday life of a woman from a distance. Sanya Malhotra’s ‘Mrs’ talks about the complexities of marital rape and the drudgery of everyday life and how the monotony of domesticity can make a woman feel inadequate.

Edited excerpts from the interview:

On being an adaptation of the Great Indian Kitchen and yet making _Mrs._ look a very pan –Indian film, how did you work on that on making it look more relatable?

We were given the rights of the original film. Great Indian Kitchen has already been adapted in three to four other languages. Captured in both Tamil and Telugu, and this was a Hindi adaptation.  The challenge was to retain the essence of the original. But at the same time, I wanted to make it more accessible. Also, I think the original is made by a male director.

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The Great Indian Kitchen was more from the male point of view, but this was looking at it from the female arc… what was your process of bringing in that essence?
I wanted to show the horror of everyday life. Since, I am a woman I didn’t want to show the female angle from a distance. I want to show the journey of this girl at a very personal level. So, here, Richa (Sanya Malhotra) was very excited to get married. She was very excited to even have sex too, but with love. This is a story that every woman in our country can relate to. I didn’t have to go to another country for the research of my film. I got the references very close to home.

It happened to my house. So I could bring in a lot of things that were also unique to me apart from using the essence of the original. While, of course, we have adapted the original, we have used the original like a book and, you know, added our own things to it to make it our own.

So you said that it’s inspired from your home also, quite a bit of it…

A lot of it. It’s personal because this is my mother’s, my aunts’ stories are very similar. I’m also married for fifteen years, so I also have experienced some pieces of Richa’s life in the film.

It’s not that I’m doing a murder mystery adaptation or detective story adaptation. For me, it is a story that speaks about something that is very close to my heart, and I’ve witnessed it from up close quarters. While cooking, I also keep tasting food at least 10 times, I am like a master chef. It is to check whether the taste is correct or not. Richa in the film gets taunted for this act. I have also in my real life got taunted for this. Cooking and cleaning are thankless jobs and we don’t get paid for this. I thought we brought in lot of nuances that made our character more endearing and more accessible as compared to original.

And you spoke with the marital rape a lot in ‘Mrs.’… Can enlighten me on that bit also. The original story also had that bit?

Yes, the original also has a bit of it but then later on the original goes very extreme on it. My thing was that I never went extreme in my film in the treatment. In the original, by the end of it, she’s almost treated like some cattle.

She’s asked to take bath in a pond and not in the house bathroom and things like that when she was having her periods. If you see the statistic, like, twenty thousand housewives commit suicide. So that is the statistics. So women are treated much worse that what is shown in the film. There’s nothing extreme being asked of her. Like, just cook good food.

In the film Mrs., Richa (Sanya Malhotra) says,  ‘Sex is not a task. You don’t do any foreplay.’ He goes directly to the act.  The original one has it in a milder way. But here you have stressed on marital rape being shown in the film. Why was it so?

In Mrs., the fight back is huge. The thing she says, like, you know, mechanical sex which is true. This fightback starts the night where he gaslights her. My cousin once mentioned about her husband wanting sex every now and then

My cousin once said, “In the night, if he woke up, he would want sex, and he would not think of my emotions at all.” So, it is like that, men are unaware that this is also important. Like, the little foreplay is important.

WATCH the trailer of Mrs. film here: