'Feminist Fathima' Movie Review: The Charm And Rhythm Transcend The Weighty Symbolism

Writer and director: Fasil Muhammad
Producer: Thamar KV, Sudheesh Scaria

A critic, a friend, whispered as the screening of the film began, that he has a rough rule of thumb, one that has kept him in good stead as critic, as programmer — if a film’s background score comes before its first dialogue, it spells doom. There is a sound logic here, because the background score, over time, across independent and commercial films, has become less atmospheric, and more atmosphere — the adjective often takes centre stage as noun. It doesn’t state the scene as much as douse it.

Fasil Muhammad’s debut film, Feminist Fathima, which premiered in competition at the 29th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), as though winking at this theory, begins with a background score, a camera gliding over the sand strewn, wave-crashed landscape of Ponnani in Kerala.

Feminist Fathima, almost immediately, tests the strength of it, posturing itself as an exception, a counter. Sometimes the film wants you to sink into its world before it unfolds itself to you. It is demanding, but that is how some films are. With a top shot of a family sleeping on a bed, and a lulling score, you would think this is an invitation into their intimate lives.

Feminist Fathima is that, to a meek extent — but more emphatically, it is about the bed, and the lengths to which this bed will upturn the dynamics of this family. Fathima (Shamla Hamza), a housewife with three children, a demanding, demeaning mother-in-law who wants to both replicate the violence she experienced and stand apart from it, and an oppressive husband, is in the throes of a morning, the demands of the day piling up as she rushes around, when she is told that her eldest son wet the bed. This is also the bed she sleeps in. The pile of tasks further sediments. Would the day topple?

The film tumbles into action — but you do not yet know this is the action, so matter of fact its treatment, the mundane shuttling between duties, one of which is getting this mattress cleaned, dried, and kept safe from dogs and cats. She has a neighbour, a scrap collector, who pad her day, but not in obvious postures of allyship. They aren’t shoulders for her to weep, merely hands to hold as you are forced to act, to move, to keep at it.

The one big obstacle in her life is her husband Ashraf (Kumar Sunil), the ustad of the local mosque, a man who uses the power bestowed by religion to shroud his waning power outside of the mosque — the world is changing too much, he is not able to catch up, and he is afraid of feminists. What could have been a more evasive and complicated portrait, the film is uninterested in him as anything but a symbol for Fathima to crush.

Though the film, like Fathima, cannot stray too far. It cannot do the burst of feminist violence of Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey (2022) or the strident divorce of The Great Indian Kitchen (2021). It can only chip away at the man.

The film leans heavily on his villainy, one that is not given an arc of redemption, but humiliation and isolation, instead. This allows the film’s rips — when Fathima finally, through gestures both large and small, through words both spoken and whispered — to feel like moments of juicy heroism. Watching him try to open a pressure cooker — an act he has never performed — is exacting, comical, and heartbreaking. He looks at the switches, wondering which one is for the fan, because he has always called Fathima to do that.

For such an iron-clad, straight jacket title, the film is densely textured, cataloguing the smallest of demands made on Fathima’s time — where is the toothpaste? Where is the shawl? Where are the slippers? Where is the tea?

Though these demands reflect his entitlement, more moving is how it ties Fathima to the house. The unsaid question in “Where is this?” is “Where are you?”. His demands become her leash, and you feel her, over the course of the film, stretching that leash, as she moves farther away. The bed, as the festival catalogue describes, becomes a symbol. And symbols have an unsubtle way of taking space.

But it isn’t the symbol that makes the film what it is. Riding on this fleeting rhythm it creates — cinematic time folds itself into Fathima’s labours and leisures, when she finally rests her aching back on a soft bed, that relief echoes across the screen — Feminist Fathima is a charming triumph, that something so glaringly on the nose, so explicitly and weightily symbolic, can still float.

Feminist Fathima premiered in competition at the 29th International Film Festival of Kerala.