Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Soni’, An Indian Film About Two Women Fighting Sexism In The Delhi P.D.

In the current #MeToo era, it would seem that women around the world are finally being heard. But that’s not necessarily true, as the movie Soni points out; two women who are a self-created task force to flush out men who attack women late at night still have to deal with a well-entrenched patriarchy that compares them to a standard the men don’t have to reach. Read on to find out more…

SONI: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Soni (Geetika Vidya Ohlyan) is a senior Delhi police officer who, along with her supervisor Kalpana (Saloni Batra), are a two-person task force that try to flush out men who commit violence against women under the veil of darkness. Soni is high-strung (to say the least), but not without reason; she’s tired about how pervy men in Delhi are able to attack women without much consequence. It doesn’t help that she’s been on her own since her husband Naveen (Vikas Shukla) left, and she’s not exactly happy when he comes back in her life.

But her high-strung nature gets her in trouble, even in cases where her actions were justified, albeit extreme. She beats up a man who follows her into a dark alley while she’s riding a bike. She drags a drunken naval officer out of his car when he refuses to get out voluntarily.

Kalpana knows that Soni is a great officer, even if she doesn’t follow the proper protocols. So when Soni gets call center duty after the incident with the naval officer, she appeals to her husband Sandeep (Mohit Chauhan), a higher-up in the DPD, to get her reinstated. Sandeep, for his part, helps Kalpana, but not without chiding her that she gets too personally involved with her officers.

After Soni’s reinstatement, the two go on patrol again; one night Kalpana takes Soni for a dinner where she hopes to get Soni to act more rationally. She barely says anything before Soni gets attacked by three men using the ladies room to snort coke. Again, while she’s in the right, the investigation goes against her simply because she’s a woman.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Unfortunately, you could go back decades and find dramas and comedies that have concentrated on sexism and attacks on women, from 9 to 5 to Working Girl to Sleeping with the Enemy.

Performance Worth Watching: Olyhan and Batra make a good pair, fighting against the well-entrenched patriarchy in India seemingly on their own. The scenes between the two of them is where Soni shines, especially in a scene where Kalpana visits Soni and gives her a book of poetry, bemoaning the fact that Soni shouldn’t be benched just because of a temper that would be ignored if she was male.

Memorable Dialogue: Kalpana, after she and Soni see male constables soliciting bribes from two people they catch having sex in an abandoned building, equates the waste of policing time to her late grandmother, who wouldn’t get her hair shaved in order to have surgery for an infection around her ear. “She refused because her hair was sacred to her. The surgery never happened. The infection spread, and it became impossible to save her.”

Single Best Shot: We quite liked seeing Soni slap the smug out of the drunken naval officer who wouldn’t get out of his car.

Sex and Skin: Not that kind of movie.

Our Take: There’s not much of a plot that propels Soni, directed and co-written by Ivan Ayer. This is his first feature film, and it shows in its slow pacing; it’s like he took the material from a 50-minute short and padded it out to 96 minutes via the use of very long pauses between snippets of conversation, scenes of Soni warming up a cup of water in her microwave, and lots of middle-distance stares. It’s a struggle to get through the movie, even when you’re alert and awake, because of these long pauses between dialogue that don’t really add to the story.

But that doesn’t mean that the movie isn’t worth watching. It’s a slice of life in big-city India, where women have been fighting against attacks and general sexism for longer than the U.S. has existed. Family and class structures are more ingrained in India, leading to scenes like Sandeep’s mother questioning Kalpana about why she’s doing all these night shifts and why she hasn’t thought about children yet. And it leads to scenes where, despite being promoted to a station chief’s position, she is still subject to being lectured by Sandeep about her leadership skills. Soni effectively communicates how frustrating it is to be a woman in a highly patriarchal society, even while women are speaking up in other parts of the world.

Our Call: STREAM IT for the message, but don’t be afraid to fast-forward a bit past the dead moments.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Soni on Netflix