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The 1970s were the era of the angry young man in Hindi cinema and by the time 1977 rolled around, Bachchan’s supremacy was well established. The highest grossing film of that year, Amar Akbar Anthony, had a big star cast but it was well known that Bachchan’s Anthony was the driving force of that movie. But in the same year, Smita Patil starred in the Shyam Benegal film Bhumika, and while she was nothing like the ‘angry young man’, she certainly channeled the anger of someone who had been manipulated all her life and was fighting a losing battle against patriarchy. Bhumika is based on the life of film actor Hansa Wadkar’s memoir Sangtye Aika. Hansa was an actor in the 1930s and 1940s and her memoir talked of her experiences in Hindi cinema and Marathi theatre.
Films on Hindi cinema have developed a set template in the last few years wherein we see the rise and fall of a movie star and their struggles with handling their fame. Kareena Kapoor starrer Heroine, and Madhuri Dixit’s Fame Game followed similar beats but Bhumika chooses to explore the life of a movie star using her profession as just a backdrop. The mishaps in Usha’s life aren’t necessarily triggered by her fame, but the loneliness that keeps swallowing her is highlighted even more when we see her being as successful as one can be. Vidya Balan’s The Dirty Picture and Keerthy Suresh’s Mahanati also had their protagonists struggling with the hollowness of their success but in these too, their loneliness was a direct downside to their success. In Bhumika, however, it seems like Usha would have suffered no matter what she did for a living.
The loneliness, we are told, is not the result of her profession, but a natural progression of her emotionally disturbing life where she has been manipulated by her much older husband from a very young age. With her husband Keshav, played by Amol Palekar, she has been in a toxic relationship from the time she was a young child. He holds her to promises that she never even made and makes her feel guilty about not fulfilling them. He lives off her income, but makes her feel indebted to him. Usha, unaware of his manipulative tactics, gets played, over and over again. The many loves she encounters in her journey – Rajan (Anant Nag), Sunil (Naseeruddin Shah), and Vinayak (Amrish Puri) don’t seem as harmful as Keshav at first but upon spending time with them, Usha ends up at the same conclusion. In a significant scene towards the end, a woman tells Usha that the faces of men might change, but their nature stays the same.
Smita’s Usha is reckless, until she decides not to be. She bends over backwards to please the men around her, until she finally decides to put her foot down and takes charge of her life. Benegal doesn’t follow the popular biography route here where her life is marked by the films that were hits or flops, but instead chooses to focus on the experiences that make her personality. He also doesn’t idolise Usha, or makes her a victim of her circumstances, but he underlines her choices, even though it is evident to the viewer that her decisions aren’t wise.
Benegal does not protect Usha from the audience. He makes her unlikable, but you end up empathising with her anyway, and a lot of credit for the same goes to Smita. The actor, who was just 22 at the time, put up a mature performance where the subtext of her expressions carries more weight than her dialogues. During her regular outings in a hotel room, where she goes to escape her nightmarish life at home, you always see her in a different light. Smita effectively communicates what she wants you to know without using any words and you instantly lend your sympathetic ear to the woman who has not made the best choices.
Bhumika is a biopic that works even if you have no clue about the real story behind it, and like many other biopics it doesn’t make its protagonists the one who was wronged by the unjust world. Instead, it reminds you that your choices have consequences and until you choose differently, the outcomes won’t change.
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