(NSI News Source Info) July 8, 2008: Provoked answers the com
plicated question of domestic disharmony with a deft and direct approach to the question of a woman’s place in the man’s scheme of things. The battered wife Kiranjit Ahluwalia (Aishwarya Rai) chooses to kill husband (Naveen). The story is based on a true story where Kiranjit found freedom by setting her brutal husband on fire.
Cleverly but tenderly formatted as a thriller — in — flashback, Provoked opens with the burning figure of Deepak Ahluwalia (Naveen Andrews) running screaming out of his house. Mundhra moves smoothly backwards into events leading to this gruesome incident. Full credit to Aishwarya Rai for plunging deep into a part.
The vulnerable, fragile little-girl-lost quality in her personality works to great advantage in portraying the spouse-burning victim as a woman scorned beyond endurance. Among the unforgettable sequences, count the one where the stern lady constable asks Kiranjit to take off her jewellery and clothes.
Blessedly we are shown only fragments of Kiranjit’s trauma. Director Mundhra makes sure they are enough to make us wince without making our stomachs churn. Female bonding has always been a favourite theme in his films (remember Shabana Azmi and Deepti Naval in Kamla?). In Provoked the bond that develops between Kiranjit and her cell mate Veronica is remarkably well-tuned to the sisters’-solidarity theme that forms the narrative’s backbone.
Nandita Das is also in fine form as a spunky ‘sister’ activist holding up a torch for the torched husband’s tortured wife. Every actor in the smallest role gets it right…and bright. Naveen Andrews’s despicable brutality as the husband makes your skin crawl, as it’s meant to.
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