Monica, O My Darling is a faithful neo-noir entertainer that sticks to the rules

Huma Qureshi as Monica Machado in 'Monica, O My Darling'. (Screen grab)

Dressed in red, the colour of sin in popular culture, a voluptuous Monica Machado (Huma Qureshi) dances at her office party. The men can’t take their eyes off her and she makes at least one woman feel insecure with her alluring presence. Monica is at the heart of Netflix’s latest Hindi original release, Monica, O My Darling. She’s a woman who’s unapologetic about her sexuality and weaponises it for material gain. Like Circe, she lures men into her lair and plays mind games with them. She’s at once a female villain and a barely disguised male fantasy.

Directed by Vasan Bala, Monica, O My Darling begins with a bloodless, chilling murder. There’s no mystery as to who the killer is or what the motive behind the crime is. But the murder is only a trigger for a series of events drenched in black comedy. Bala’s neo-noir film faithfully uses the archetypes of the genre – an anti-hero protagonist, a femme fatale, an ‘ideal’ woman who is in contrast to the femme fatale’s sense of morality, an investigator or figure of authority who examines the crime, and slightly ridiculous men who are cuckolded. The stage for these characters to meet and implode is Unicorn, a Pune-based company that makes advanced robotic technology, the brainchild of Jayant Arhedkar.

Rajkummar Rao’s Jayant has ‘aspiration’ written all over his face; he’s a lower middle class boy in a rich people’s world, and he’s made his way to the top by sheer hard work. In a flashback that appears at a crucial juncture, Jayant demonstrates just how dedicated he can be – a young boy studying a Marathi poem at 3 am, repeating the lines to himself and unwilling to break his concentration. This is a hero who became an anti-hero because of his sudden exposure to the big bad world – or at least, that’s the story that Jayant likes to tell himself.

Bala draws out the connections between the various characters at the office party where Monica is the magnet of desire. The title song is from the 1971 Hindi thriller Caravan. In the original, it is Helen who performs to ‘Piya Tu Ab To Aaja’ with its suggestive heaves and deep breaths. The song, with its high recall value, works brilliantly well in this scene where desire is the monster lurking within every character.

A disappointed son (Sikander Kher) who feels sidelined in his own company, a jealous fiancee (Akansha Ranjan Kapoor), an employee who counted his chickens too fast (Bagavathi Perumal), and a man (Sukant Goel) obsessed with his wife. Then, of course, there’s Monica herself who embodies desire and bends it to her will.

Immediately after we know who these people are, Bala introduces the conflict. Monica is pregnant and it could be any of the men that she’s been sleeping around with. When a body surfaces, the tension reaches its high point. The staging of the drama is superb and involves multiple modes of transport, landscapes and locations. Radhika Apte as ACP Naidu is a hoot with her self aggrandizing jokes and casual yet clinical approach to the investigation. Her face-offs with Jayant are hilarious, adding to the film’s determinedly unserious tone to crime.

Essentially, Monica O My Darling is a game played by these two women where the men are the pawns. This sounds like a forward cinematic universe, but is it really so? It’s only in recent years that we’ve come to understand that the stereotype of a woman who sleeps her way to the top is, actually, a victim of sexual harassment at the workplace. It may seem far-fetched to view the manipulative Monica as a victim, but that’s also because the ‘sexy secretary’ role is deliberately written that way, without any references to the power that men wield in the setup (A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf is recommended reading for anyone who wants to understand the construction of women characters in the male imagination throughout history) .

One may think back to another Monica, a woman whose surname is Lewinsky. In her groundbreaking standup show Nanette, comedian Hannah Gadsby ripped into fellow comedians who made Lewinsky the butt of jokes when the Clinton scandal broke out in 1998. At the time, Lewinsky was vilified as a femme fatale – a 24-year-old intern at the White House who was in a sexual relationship with the 52-year-old POTUS, arguably the most powerful politician in the world. Yet, as Gadsby points out in her show, it was Lewinsky who was reviled in the media with no understanding whatsoever of the power dynamics at play.

In the same vein, one may wonder if it’s Monica Machado who is the chief antagonist of Monica, O My Darling or the men in top positions in the company who crave her company in bed but see her as expendable. Do they all deserve the same fate that the film’s moral compass dishes out to them?

It’s true that the femme fatale is a recurring character in films of this genre, but would it be playing spoilsport to examine the archetypes themselves and the inherent misogyny in them? Sriram Raghavan’s highly acclaimed Andhadhun (2018) which is of the same genre and also set in Pune, has a femme fatale too. Tabu’s Simi is delightfully wicked, but she is, at the end of the day, cast in the mould of a ‘gold-digger’ and eventually killed for her sins.

Noir films allow women characters to appear as powerful, sexual beings in a way that other genres don’t. This can be read as freeing, yet, the archetypes of the femme fatale and the ideal woman exist as contrasts that cannot intersect. One is good, the other is bad. One is innocent, the other is cunning. One is virginal, the other is seductive. One lives, the other dies. The archetypes of the male characters, however, inhabit an amoral space where virtue and vice can co-exist in bonhomie. To be fair, Monica, O My Darling tries not to turn Qureshi into a vamp, and there are some lines too which attempt to offset the moral judgement towards her deeds.

Making the investigator archetype female is also a good idea – but there’s still a niggling feeling of discomfort that this reviewer felt at the end of it. Is it unthinkable that these rules be rewritten, not just adjusted, when making a neo-noir film today? Why can’t Monica Machado survive her sins? This may have benefitted the film, too, seeing as the screenplay visibly sags after the character meets her resolution.

The film plays up the retro effect wonderfully – it’s not just the soundtrack (though it feels overused in the second half) and colour grading, it’s also the snakes that slither into the narrative (even the robot behaves like a vengeful nagin). With terrific performances and slick production values, Monica, O My Darling is an enjoyable and tongue-in-cheek return to the old. But it isn’t nearly as inventive as it could have been.