Director: Gunasekhar· Language: Hindi· Link to watch: https://www.hotstar.com/in/movies/euphoria/1271683446?search_query=eu
This movie portrays a rape case through a completely different lens than the audience could presume. Along with the progression of the plot, we realise how rape isn’t an individual but a social crime and how social trends trap bright students into self-destruction. The movie provokes your thoughts not only about the victim but also about the accused of the rape.
The girl is shown to be a devout, obedient and intelligent elder girl of a well-educated family. When she revealed how she had been gang raped, her parents didn’t see it as a shame for themselves and stood firmly by her. This was the first stereotype the movie breaks, where rape has become a shame for the victim and her family in our society. Although all the rapists were from politically influential families, her parents were afraid of neither the social shame they would be thrown into by the hypocritical society nor of the time a court case could take in a country where justice in some cases is delayed sometimes till the death of the victim.
The boys (rapists) are from extensively rich and politically powerful families. They are minors (seventeen years old), as was the victim girl. The second stereotype broken in the movie was that the mother of one of the rapists (Vikas), who was portrayed as the one who led the rest of the four to commit the crime, went against all other parents, even by helping the police collect evidence against her son. Otherwise, the police didn’t have any proof, and the boys could have been released due to a lack of evidence. She fought even against her husband, who wanted her to use her contacts to fight for the life and freedom of their son. Even at the moment when her son tried to commit suicide in police custody, she saved him by calling a high-profile doctor; and everyone expected that maybe the heart of a mother had melted, but she cursed her son for dying daily every second for the crime he had committed. When all the fathers have been presented to back their rapist sons, a mother was seen fighting for justice in solidarity with her gender for the victim girl.
The third stereotype the movie breaks is when Vikas was shown to be sexually abused by his cellmates in the prison. The scene depicts that no gender can protect you from being raped. The scene leaves the audience with a question: what will be your reaction if a male who himself is a rapist is sexually assaulted? Would you be able to see Vikas’ sexual assault through the same lens as you saw Chaitra’s? And if not, then it calls out the gendered hypocrisy of our society through which we think that males can’t be victims of sexual assault or that sexual assault doesn’t harm males the way they harm a female.
Then the story moves with Vikas’ journey from becoming a drug dealer to coming out on parole, and in a scene, while on drugs had a thought of being sexually involved with his mother. That was the moment when the mother broke, and the movie broke one more social stereotype. The moment he had the thought was the moment when the audience realised that he was on drugs that day too when he raped Chaitra. Actually, all five of them… the seventeen-year-old boys were on drugs. Here arise the questions: how did they have access to such intoxicating drugs when they were just seventeen? Who is responsible for that? The bar owner? The police who couldn’t investigate that before the crime was committed? The parents who were not aware that their seventeen-year-old sons had access to drugs? The parents who convinced their least interested daughter to go to the party? And if there can be so many people to be in question for the boys being high on drugs at that age, then how can these boys be the only accused?
This is where the movie questions the glorification of bars, parties, and being cool images in the youth of our society. A girl named Richie kills herself while high on drugs while being unaware of her whereabouts. Then who is the victim? The underage children who are drugged or the social system which provides them with the drugs. All the drug addicts are presented as destroying their lives and the joy of their families. Then what are they? Criminals or victims? The criminals in the prison who attacked Vikas are also part of our society. The people who we see criticising Vindhya (Vikas’ mother) when she helped her son to be out on parole for appearing in an exam are seen to be appreciating her when Vikas started taking studies seriously. Those were the people who represented our society in the movie, who were watching everything happening at a distance, passing good or bad commentary on everything but willing to do nothing about it.
Eventually, Vikas, a joyful, intelligent student, is portrayed as a victim of this hypocritical society where everyone, including the drug dealers and his parents, is running a race for money and power. At times, his life is completely ignored by everyone, and when, by mistake and being drugged, he fell for the social trap, his mistake was highlighted, and he was declared to be the sole criminal. During the climax, some people wearing hoodies gathered around him and started a provocative dance around him; their faces weren’t revealed, and when he tried to run away, they caught him in between, depicting that he was trapped in his situation by the faceless society.
In the end, his mother was the one who was presented to take the responsibility for her son’s moral failure, as she was the mother and could have saved him. She said, “A bad root is the cause of bad fruit.” But through this scene, the movie calls out everyone in our society who was to be held responsible for such social crimes. While concluding, the movie gives a call for an ideal society where morality should come under law and immorality should be punishable. While we can’t see every rapist as a victim of society, the movie portrays Vikas to be not only the accused but also the victim of the rape he had committed. Hence, the movie successfully portrays that the rape cases we hear and read in the news can’t always be committed because of some physical arousal; rather, many a time the reason behind such crimes is the patriarchal and gender-biased psyche of the males who actually are victims of our social structure.