5 min readUpdated: Feb 7, 2025 12:46 PM IST
The distance between these two contradictory statements — the smell (khushboo) of the kitchen is sexy, and, you smell (baas) of the kitchen, do you expect me to be turned on — is measured by, who else, a man.
The man who has deposited the woman he has married and brought to his home, where he lives with his parents, in the kitchen. Where she is expected to be an uncomplaining slave to everyone’s time and moods: the doctor husband who runs a clinic while constantly complaining of overwork, expecting his wife to serve ‘garam phulkas’ when he sits down to eat, the father-in-law wanting his slippers placed just so for him to slide his feet into, the mother-in-law using the sil-batta to grind the chutney, because the mixer-grinder is not loving enough.
Mrs, a near-faithful remake of Jeo Baby’s terrific ‘The Great Indian Kitchen’, uses the societally-acceptable honorific for the perfect wife, who will not insist on a Ms, even as she struggles with keeping her dreams alive. For Richa (Sanya Malhotra), dance is not just a hobby, but a mode of self-expression. Being able to continue with her profession is a reasonable ask, but right from the get-go, she is up against both passive and active resistance, not just from her spouse Diwakar (Nishant Dahiya), but also from her father-in-law (Kanwaljit), who wields his approval like a weapon.
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Yeh kaisa banaa hai, asks Richa, after spending hours perfecting a dish, serving it, and waiting on the side: eating together, what’s that? The response is either forbidding silence (Kanwaljit has a good line on those) or a short ‘theek bana hai’, almost as if faint praise is not damning enough. The kitchen sink gets clogged all the time, the pipe leaks, and repeated requests for a plumber fall on deaf ears. The holes in a marriage which starts promisingly are getting bigger, and you feel for Richa as she keeps getting pushed deeper into corners, by the actions of an aunt (Loveleen Mishra) who turns up to lay out the rules of Karvachauth, or the endless demands of ‘shikanji’ by a bumptious visiting uncle (Varun Badola).
In the Malayalam original, leading lady Nimisha Sajayan’s disgust at the smell of her own hands at a moment her husband insists on her nightly, wifely duties, hits deeper. Baby’s camera doesn’t shy away from showing us the puke-inducing gunk in the kitchen sink; the gnawed bones lying as detritus on the dining table is more impactful than the more sanitized mess in the Hindi remake.
There are also the underlined dialogues which feel as if they exist to score points. Says Richa to a little girl: a woman is like an undivided primary number, and that’s her secret power. It’s a good line, but it comes across as a constructed dialogue. And it takes a little away from the natural vein that the film is aiming for.
The ostracism of the woman during her periods is shown more starkly in Baby’s film, as is the conversation around women being kept out of the Sabarimala temple: patriarchy rears its ugly head not only in the bedroom and the kitchen, but also in the way a woman is allowed, or not, to be pious. All traces of religiosity and rituals are completely obliterated from the remake. Given how fraught it is to touch even fleetingly upon any religious elements these days, this caution is understandable, but it blunts the edges: a period in the Hindi film becomes 4-5 days of ‘araam’, rather than turfing the menstrual woman out of home and hearth for those days.
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Still, and especially for those who haven’t watched the original, Mrs has enough merit. This is just the kind of film, with a clutch of effective performances and important messaging, which should be made mandatory viewing for couples. Women are not just primary or secondary numbers; they are the ones that make things, and people, whole.
Mrs movie cast: Sanya Malhotra, Nishant Dahiya, Kanwaljit, Varun Badola, Loveleen Mishra
Mrs movie director: Aarti Kadav
Mrs movie rating: 3 stars
Sanya Malhotra-starrer Mrs.