The Shameless is the result of a long work of reflection on Indian society. In 2014, well before the fiction presented in Cannes in the section A certain lookKonstantin Bojanov began filming the story of Devadasi sex workers in the Karnataka Indian region. Touched by Reshma's sorority relationship with his friend Renuka, the Bulgarian-American director decided to use it as a starting point to paint this portrait to the feminine. With The Shameless, refuge and flight are confused through the history of two women whom age separates, but carried by the same desire for freedom in the face of a world that oppresses.
The status of women in caste testing
To get out of the Western prism, one must look at the foundations and determinants of Indian society. Sadly famous for being placed on the podium of the World's Most Dangerous Countries for WomenIndia is deeply marked by archaic inequalities. Behind the joyful glamour of Bollywood – where it will not escape anyone that gender clichés are endorsed at every production – the condition of Indian women struggles to improve. In spite of an equal constitution and a growing presence of the latter in the places of power, the Indian patriarchate is frontal and closely intrigued in a feudal system of castes and community to which the subjects belong.
The family is the first breeding ground for cultural discrimination. Unlike our Western societies marked by the liberal revolution and the conquest of rights centered on the individual, in India, it is the kinship that defines the framework of freedoms conferred and thus endorses inequalities, a fortiori genders. This is what the professor and teacher-researcher explains. Kamala Marius in its article « India: law moves forward, patriarchy resists » :
« Indian patriarchy imposes a symbolic spatial dichotomy between male and female by limiting women to spaces assigned to men. »
Whether it is the Hindu religion, which is the overwhelming majority in India, or the residual Muslim communities themselves persecuted by the regime, there is an organization around the family unit, where the gender roles are defined without the individual being able to undo them. For example, from the age of fifteen, boys are recognized as adults unlike girls. They will rather be valued as mothers, especially if they give birth to boys. Intrafamilial relations of domination are reproduced from generation to generation on the basis of an age-old hierarchical principle: everyone must respect and obey the head of the family. If it is most often a man, in his absence it is the oldest matriarchs who run the home. Kamala Marius specifies this double up and down lock:
« Whatever its economic and social status, the position of a man or woman in the family hierarchy is definitive: its obligations towards its "superior" and its demands towards its "subordinates" are immutable. »
These introductory remarks, apart from, and nevertheless essential to understand the framework of The Shameless, the account of Konstantin Bojanov the root of one of these centuries-old communities, that of Devadasi, more commonly called « women for ever ». This religious practice today prohibited, condemns its members to a life of prostitution and clandestineity. Formerly devoted to the worship of a deity, prepubertal young girls are today the tribute of men to whom they are served by their own family for some rupees, even sold in marriage to higher castes from the first signs of fertility.
In some Hindu myths, the legend Devadasi wants a king to fall in love with a dancer. Frightened, the humiliated queen challenged the young woman: if she could cross the river on a steep rope, she could join the royal family and permanently raise the status of her caste. But with two fingers to succeed, as the beautiful dancer approached the other bank, the queen cut the rope. « So far, we have attracted your men to dance »She replied to the Queen before adding: « From now on, we will take them with our bodies. » We find this same sinister logic in the character of Renuka, who, to flee the country, will have to prostitute himself over and over again.
Behind this story that Devadasi mothers content themselves with children from an early age, we understand how much this domestic pimp is cultivated through backward myths that only strengthen the trafficking of women. Although prohibited since 1880 under the influence of Gandhi and Campaigns « anti-nauch »This tradition continues in the towns and villages of the Karnataka,Andhra Pradesh as in Nepal. Originally supposedly destined for the service of the gods, these courtesans and dancers initiated to l'eroticism gradually turned privileged into precarious street prostitutes. In the face of poverty, and with the growing age of the elderly, the younger ones in turn become the main source of income for the family as explained Here a Badi girl, another Nepalese caste subjected to the same « sacrifice ». The victims thus become the executioners of their own offspring, which they condemn to life prostitution. There's like a transmission of trauma from mother to daughter.
Break the walls, leave the shadows
In The ShamelessIt is felt that Konstantin Bojanov is not entirely comfortable with the look he looks at such physical or sexual violence that he systematically presents out of the field. It is not necessarily necessary to see to understand, but this modesty partly deprives of the intensity of certain scenes, especially during the outcome. The director also concedes many filming problems, the fim having been made in Nepal and co-produced between Switzerland, France and Bulgaria for reasons that are guessed. The Indian actresses themselves were reluctant to participate in scenes of nudity, which are supposed to be harder to assume among women in a deeply religious society and on the brink of implosion.
Undoubtedly entangled in his own Western white man look (it's a perilous exercise of denouncing a society of which one is not involved), the director insists that he did not want to make a social drama going so far as to say that « The Shameless is not a political film »As if it were a big word! However, he adds that « If the film can, if only an instant, open a discussion about the rights of sex workers and how they are treated and abused, if it can give them a little dignity, then it would be infinitely happy. ». This refusal to name the fact « political », we find it on screen with the concern to present things in a very clinical way. It is assumed that he did not want to burn or fall into the pitfall of the pathos proper to the judgment of the foreigner, moreover associated with the old colonial world. He even admits that « This [that] shows in the film is actually much more sweetened than what happens in real life ».
Yet all the elements are well combined to unravel the perpetuation of a practice that feeds on poverty and which must be described as unspeakable. The western eye is difficult to take a neutral look from its privileged position. The incomprehension is total, while he never had to confront the cultural impregnated to prostitute his children to live as director Beeban Kidron explains in her report Sex, Death and the Gods.
The very first plan of The Shameless Perhaps a sharper starting point than the one chosen for the final film. An obese man, naked and lagged with knives, is a sign of a bad customer whom one guesses to have been eliminated by the woman in the foreground, Renuka, a quadrennial who washes his hands of his actions and recoils quietly in front of the ice, the steel look, the tight jaw, a sign of unwavering determination. On the run, the young woman in the boy's air leaves the brothel and lights up a cigarette at night, from a taxi to a bus, from one run to another.
These captivating first few minutes are bathed in primary lights passing from red to blue as in a dream that would turn into a nightmare. A man with a lubricated look staring at him as much as he silently interrogates Renuka after his crime. Is it a « Moral failure » and/or « Law » as the duality of a word of which etymology does not clearly divide between legality and legitimacyYet two concepts that everything opposes? Renuka is not misander by choice, but because she was born a woman.
Our Lady and the fucking
The photograph of The Shameless conquered us because it gives the impression of tending towards a twilight tale, as if it were to hope that the film was indeed a fiction. And it may be on this point that Konstantin Bojanov is wrong when he recuses the term of « political ». The Shameless is a political object despite him. Awarded the prize for female performance in her category, the main actress, Anasuya Sengupta is the first Indian to win such a distinction in Cannes... « only » 86 years later the first edition Hey! As regards Omara Shetty, actress who plays the role of Devika, she now wants to propose a long version of the rap song she wrote for The Shameless, as if the character caught up with the interpreter.
This cold angle chosen for The Shameless also has the benefit of universality. Despite the real differences between Indian society and the West, The Shameless questions in hollow ambivalence of shame. Two distinct words are used in German to express: « Die Schande », which can be translated into dishonor and shame and « Die Scham », modesty from a sexual point of view. This dual meaning of the two terms is perceptible in The Shameless. Caste prostitution is rooted in Devadasi families; not to submit to it is to risk the ostracisation of its peers. We must resign ourselves so that (sur)live the matriarchs who, themselves, had to pass through this stage. Paradoxically, there is like a childish modesty that Devika incarnates and that her mother wants to marry by force.
Remains this intergenerational and indistinguishable shame that induces the unsaid. You have to read it again. Florence Porcel, which first succeeded in ending the omerta that was raging so far. A silence that saved the featured PPDA host, today prosecuted by 45 women for rape and/or sexual assault. Florence Porcel has been able to reverse the burden and sense of shame, all too often misled by the victims. Universal, these terms reflect the struggle of all those born girls, like Renuka, Reshma and so many other anonymous people in India and around the world:
« There are shames that it is good to have. I learned to get rid of it. There are universal shames that strengthen us in our membership of the human race. There are shames that we go through, and others that prevent us. There are more or less powerful shames, stealthy shames and shames that anchor. There are such terrible shames. Shame on you. And there are shames that are part of our lives simply because we were born girls. »
The Shameless its vocation to universality. One slogan of the 1980s Summarizes the Indian struggle in a world of men: « We, the women of India, are not flowers, but sparks of fire ». This is the image you think of when you see Devika burning matches as long as possible, when the world seems to collapse around her. Finally his much older lover bears the name of Renuka, Hindu name from the goddess venerated in South India and often represented by a ferocious warrior as a benevolent maternal figure. Literally, Renuka means « from dust ». How else could it be? If Devadasi mothers condemn their daughters to prostitution, is it not the only way out to find refuge with other emancipatory figures, if not sacrificial?
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