Let’s Talk About Women | Huma Qureshi's Monica, O My Darling and the myth of the femme fatale

In Vasan Bala’s new Netflix whodunit Monica, O My Darling, Huma Qureshi plays the titular character Monica, the saucy, sexy personal assistant to the CEO of a Pune-based robotics giant. The epicenter of all the chaos that soon spirals beyond control, she is the latest entrant in the fabled category of feisty women cinephiles across the world recognize a little too well—femme fatale.

Dictionary.com defines the term as “an irresistibly attractive woman, especially one who leads men into difficult, dangerous, or disastrous situations.” Mull over this denotation for a while and several women in Hindi cinema who have played the trope only to tug at its margins—with wit, grit, and an infallible charisma—will start to flit across your mind like the sketchy reel of a film you watched a long time ago, loved, and had forgotten all about.

There’s Vidya Balan’s Krishna from Abhishek Chaubey’s 2010 rustic revenge drama Ishqiya. The wife of a local gangster who attempts to kill her in a gas explosion, heartbroken, she uses her cunning and raw sex appeal to seduce two unsuspecting men to trace and square old debts with him. In Balan’s hands, Krishna becomes a weapon, as dangerous and fatal as one ever made.

Then there’s Tabu’s Nimmi from Maqbool, Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2004 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic Macbeth. The 52-year-old tour de force seems to be Bollywood’s most preferred choice for women gone awry without apology. Her next femme fatale came a decade later as Ghazala Meer—beautiful like strained, solitary melancholy often is—in Haider, another Bhardwaj screen interpretation of a celebrated Shakespearean tragedy. Tabu’s third outing as the beauty who becomes the reason for the central conflict with bloody and irreversible consequences was just as memorable. This time she became Simi Sinha, a middle-aged siren who marries a much-older former movie star in the hope to launch her acting career. It was 2018. The film, Sriram Raghavan’s Andhadhun.

However, none of these women hunted with as much abandon and nonchalance as Priyanka Chopra’s Susanna Anna Marie Johannes in Bhardwaj’s 7 Khoon Maaf. In this 2011 detailed retelling of Ruskin Bond’s short story Susanna’s Seven Husbands, she starts off as a reluctant killer but by the time she murders her fourth husband—a Russian spy who she finds out has a secret wife and children in Moscow—she begins to relish the thrill. When we see the fifth in the coffin, it has become a routine for her. An orphaned heiress horribly unlucky in love, she sheds not one tear or wastes a single sigh over his dead body.

What likens Monica to Krishna, Nimmi, Ghazala, Simi, and Susanna is how, much like Chaubey, Raghavan, and Bhardwaj, Bala dares to show her in all her flawed complexity but without judgment. You may not agree with Monica’s ways, but Bala humanizes her enough for you to want to wish well for her.

In a recent  interview with Film Companion, Qureshi said that for her, that’s what stood out about Monica. “She is not a vamp. In fact, we have a huge problem with the word vamp. Why are we seeing her through that lens? She’s just like anybody else in life; she wants the best for herself and she will do whatever it takes, very much like the other characters. We have a way of looking at beautiful women who are not afraid to use their sexuality to get what they want through a certain lens and hence we call them vamps. Men do the same thing all the time but we never label them or feel the need to label them with such a derogatory term,” she said.

“So for us, it was really important to bring across her humanity and dignity. At no point does she lose the dignity of being who she is. She is quite unafraid, very clear and upfront about her needs and choices, and having been dealt a—the backstory that we don’t get into—of course, she must have come from a place of hardship but she does the best for herself and she’s very proud of it,” Qureshi added.

In one crucial scene, Susanna’s butler tries to explain why instead of leaving her husbands, she kills them. “Miss Saheb raasta nahi badla karti, kutton ka bheja uda deti hai,” he says. You almost want to ask him to advise her otherwise and tell her that her philosophy will only bring her grief and scars that would never heal, that changing her path would be a lot easier on her soul, and that it could save her and others.

It’s Susanna’s humanity that makes you want to reach out to her. It’s what Qureshi is talking about—the gut feeling that tells you Monica cannot be the killer even if the film wants you to believe otherwise. Qureshi is right. There are no vamps or femme fatales. There are just people wanting an out from situations they find themselves stuck in.

When not reading books or watching films, Sneha Bengani writes about them. She tweets at @benganiwrites. Read all the  Latest News,  Trending News,  Cricket News,  Bollywood News,  India News and  Entertainment News here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and Instagram.