Parched - the funny, frank and moving lives of a wonderful group of Indian women

One of the best films I have seen at this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival is Parched, a story of women in a conservative village in rural Rajasthan. Parched is funny and moving, frank and frightening.  It is brilliantly and beautifully directed by Leena Yadav with stunning, heartbreaking and hilarious performances.

Although a deeply affecting and often genuinely shocking story of women’s oppression, it is also vibrant and life-affirming. Yadav has also managed to make this story feel both universal and very specific to a single place, somewhere whose traditions, customs and social structures are meaningfully brought to life.

Like Sand Storm, the film is partly about the clash between the new and traditional. It shares that film’s authenticity, which is probably because both films were constructed from real stories related to the film makers and told unflinchingly and sympathetically, never making the characters stereotyped or victims but genuine heroines of their own stories, regardless of their choices.

For all the beauty of the film, and warmth and wit of the script, this is above all a film marked by three stunning central performances.  Radhika Apte brings out Lajjo’s bottomless warmth and determination to find happiness. Her joys are infections and her sorrows deeply impactful. Bijli might have been some ‘tart with a heart’ cliché in the hands of a less sensitive story teller but the film refuses to go there. Instead Surveen Chawla brings her to life as fearless and brittle, showing someone who makes the most of the limited choices and agency that she has and someone who refuses to ever give up ownership of her own life, however dark and frightening it gets.

But even beyond these two excellent performances, Tannishtha Chatterjee stands out. She came up with the original concept for the film whilst talking to women in a similar village while on location for another film. Perhaps this connection adds to the amazing depth and passion of her performance. Chatterjee brings to life the tug between tradition and duty, between modern ideas and empowerment. She creates in Rani an endless fascinating and moving character, who the audience is utterly tied to, even when she’s acting in a less sympathetic manner to her new daughter-in-law.  It is an utterly convincing and believable performance and she is the film’s heart and soul, with the most moving journey of all.

There are many things that make Parched a joy – the humour, the insight, the emotion, the gorgeous cinematography, the confident and convincing storytelling. But above all it contains a trio of wonderful performances that deserve to be widely seen.