During a recent Zoom conversation about “Santosh,” the Oscar-shortlisted international feature, director Sandhya Suri was seated comfortably in a large, nest-like wicker chair that was bolted into the ceiling in her London apartment.
“Oh, I love this seat,” she said. “I only have this one chair in this room, and when I invite friends over, we all want to be in this spot. My daughter reads in here, as well. It’s my happy place.”
The serenity of Suri’s calmly floating chair stands in contrast to “Santosh,” her phenomenal, noir-soaked feature directorial debut that follows a female police officer (Shahana Goswami) investigating the murder of a lower-caste girl in Northern India. The film uses its procedural format to mine deeper as a cultural character study.
“Santosh” is the Oscar submission from the United Kingdom, the country which won the Best International Film award with “The Zone of Interest” 11 months ago.
“I’m really happy that Britain’s standing behind this film,” Suri said. “We’re funded with British money primarily and I’m a British filmmaker. And I think the choice was really important on a deeper level.” She mentioned that the history of the U.K. and India, while not a subject of her story, cannot be ignored given the movie’s thick air of corruption, especially within law enforcement.
In the film, Santosh is a widowed woman in India who, thanks to a regional custom, is allowed to inherit her late husband’s job as a cop. She joins the force and soon gains a mentor in Geeta (Sunita Rajwar), a jaded, stone-faced elder officer with an ideology about police work that’s difficult to peg.
In conversation with TheWrap, Suri discussed her inspirations and her economical approach to filmmaking.
Mild spoilers to “Santosh” follow:
Your background is in documentaries, but the genesis of this film started with a photograph you looked at, is that right?
Yes, I was focusing on endemic violence against women in India, researching with NGOs, trying to hold the camera up to it. And then a few years later I saw an image of the protests that followed after the 2012 case of a horrible gang rape on a bus in Delhi.
In this amazing photograph, there was a lady police officer, a woman standing in front of all these angry female protesters, and she had a very enigmatic expression on her face. And I just knew she was the way into this story. Because she has the power, but she doesn’t have the power. She’s a perpetrator of violence, potentially, but also a victim. What was her story?
I just thought that was a much more interesting way in. Plus, I didn’t think I’d be granted the access that I needed to tell the story as a documentary. So I realized this was going to have to be a fiction film.
Can you talk about your two main actresses? Santosh is played by Shahana Goswami, who is a very glamorous figure in Indian cinema but also so believable in the role.
Shahana said that she felt very anxious about playing that role because this is not a role she plays, a lower middle class constable. But she has a sort of earthiness about her and a very natural beauty, which doesn’t require dropping down. She also she nailed the language and she has these amazing large expressive eyes, which add quite a lot to the storytelling.
And I really love the sensuality she has within the role. Which was important to me, because I wanted the audience to imagine a passionate life she may have had with her husband, actually. That’s why I gave her a love marriage, as opposed to another kind.
Her boss is played by Sunita Rajwar. It’s so great how we think she might be a minor character during the first 45 minutes of the movie, but then you keep building her into a figure of such complexity and duality.
Sunita is very bubbly and optimistic and jolly in her personality, and in India, many of her roles have been as the comic auntie. Everyone chases her for selfies on the street. And we have a tradition of this Indian matriarchal role, which is quite a strong archetype, so we knew we had to undercut that. So we talked through it and Sunita has such a real vulnerability about her, facially and physically, which expresses a life lived and maybe some hurt, and I feel that.
The most interesting thing about her character is that she is kind of unknowable – which I only fully realized while finishing the film. She has a scene at the end where she’s sort of justifying herself, and I was editing that up until the last minute to try and make it work.
And then I realized that I still don’t know if she believes her own rhetoric or not. What she says is deeply disturbing but also kind of understandable.
She has an incredible line of dialogue in the film, about two different types of untouchables: “The ones that no one wants to touch and the ones that can’t be touched.“
I don’t think I write dialogue that well, so I was super excited when I thought that up. The line does really sum up how everything works. It’s not only true of India, of course, but if you look at it on a more general scale, there are people who matter less everywhere. There are power structures and structures of neglect. The line sort of synthesizes everything.
As a first-time narrative filmmaker, there’s often a temptation to show off with your camera. But your compositions are so economical. How did you develop the visual style?
I always wanted to be a writer and I came to cinema because I was so excited about the economy of it. That’s the whole pleasure of it for me and even when I’m teaching, it’s always about how few shots can you tell it or with what precision can you tell it with. And still be fully immersive.
I wanted to take the audience and put them there next to my lead character, so that they can also experience the sort of little, shitty urban space she’s navigating through. And if the camera was ever going to point to itself and say, “Hey, aren’t sexy,” then I’ve pulled the audience out of it. So it was a bit of push-pull with the cinematographer [Lennert Hillege]. He had a lot of really great ideas and wanted to put a few more sexy shots in.
Well, this is where I need to ask you about the shot near the very end. Santosh is at a train station and as the train arrives, she glimpses a young couple through the gaps in the train. It just amazing how one simple shot can express so much. It’s like an old zoetrope or a flip book. Was it all done in camera?
Oh yes, of course. In the camera and with the timetables of train arrivals by our side, but this is in India and you never know how reliable the timetables are. So we had crew members down to do trainspotting for us.
I’d written in the script that the couple were going to be there, this runaway couple at the train station that Santosh observes and what they would represent to her. Sort of like a dream or a fantasy in some way. Then I was at the train station and I saw the station master behind a passing train and I thought, “Oh God, that’s how she’s going to experience this moment.”
We knew it had to be a cargo train, because they have bigger slots between cars. And we cast the girl the day before and the guy was from our catering team. Then we quickly got the costumes and the lighting set up. There’s also a slow zoom in the scene. And then we saw the train coming and we had one or two chances and we just got the shot.
I want to give a lot of credit to my brilliant boy and girl who acted in that shot. And my wonderful camera team. It was a very nerve-wracking night to grab that shot. If we didn’t get it right then, there was no money for reshoots. And they all pulled it off.
