Dorothy Review: Karthik Subbaraj Mistakes Bizarre Assumptions For Bravery In Deeply Questionable Drama

Karthik Subbaraj’s Dorothy would like to believe that it has the kind of bravery that can singlehandedly cut wide open the possibilities of what mainstream Indian cinema can utter and traverse. There’s a swagger and bruised melancholy at its heart which almost seduces us. In its urgent, rallying reversals of the masculinity that trumpets itself through today’s cinema, Dorothy stands apart. Its eagerness to chart its own course, often unwieldy and turbulent and hypnotic, merits attention. Yet, it keeps chafing against its noble intentions. It opens against a landscape saturated with the violent, brutish excesses of men. We are plunged into the Madurai of the ‘90s. Even the flutters of a naïve friendship between two school boys, Subbu and Karthi, take place amidst bullying and the male prerogative to flex brawn.

Karthi is retreating, demure. Subbu is more brash. He comes to Karthi's defence and never leaves his side. It’s he who coaches Karthi in the language and demeanour of intimidation which he witnesses day in and day out at home. Subbu has a lot of trauma which he dismisses. Karthi is immediately affected when Subbu talks of how his mother and sister were found dead in a well. Subbu is startled at his new friend’s sensitivity. He chides him, urging him that men do not cry. It’s a refrain that will return in new iterations over the film’s course. Karthi is from a lower caste. He lives with his mother. The higher-caste Subbu has only ever known a big brood of much elder brothers and spites his father, the moneylender Veeraiya (Muthukumar). However, the grown-up versions of Karthi (Rishikanth) and Subbu (Sananth), flip their childhood selves’ familiar characteristics. Karthi toughens up and Subbu softens. This transformation never gets the space it required, which is exactly why latter revelations rankle despite the breathtaking honesty both Rishikanth and Sananth bring. Karthi becomes someone who’s desperate to appease Subbu’s family, the latter’s family who rules over him and his brothers with an iron fist.

Muthukumar is chilling in the mercilessness Subbu’s father casually sets loose. Things turn more fraught when one of Subbu’s brothers brings a wife from Kerala, Dorothy (Keerthy Suresh). Growing up in an ecosystem where male pride is the only available, immediately visible recourse, Dorothy encourages Subbu to reject and challenge, follow what he has long stifled.

(Spoiler Alert)

Not everything in Dorothy coheres. There are passages and revelations that feel too abrupt. They needed to be laid out with greater cohesion. The midpoint ‘twist’ also takes time to settle into. It demands from the viewer. Not everyone will be likely to get along. Its initial outlay tends to jut out instead of evenly folding into the narrative. A weaker storyteller relies on such a disclosure to churn action, chug the story along. Subbaraj’s choice can be questioned, especially how he positions trans agency. He has that grating familiar impulse to interlace transness with divinity, a sort of perfunctory course-correcting elevation. The trans person’s existence is saddled with the imperative to undo centuries of patriarchal damage. This type of representational schema can inadvertently create difference instead of embedding the trans community within the mundane. It designs a performative remove instead of situating them in the everyday. Neither was I particularly sold on a latter, otherwise impassioned piece of dialogue that essentially arrogates too much special blessing upon the community to be a humbling rebuttal to the carnage men have wrought over ages.

Parts of the writing are too laboured, dawdling in verbalising the discomfort, the tiff. Subbaraj has assembled two fantastic leads who step up more than capably in registering every shade of the shifting dynamic. The spirit and verve of the filmmaker is matched by two incredible leads who mine endless pathos and dilemma with just a shooting glance. It’s the throbbing heart the performances find which offset nagging representational concerns, but only up to a degree. The film's gaze on trans awakening is too broad, force-fitted into desultory flashbacks.

The problem is the supposedly audacious interruption appears incongruent, bursting at us in the way of a sensationalist, voyeuristic trick. Subbaraj builds a world drenched in toxic masculinity, where aggression is fuelled through caste venom. It’s ugly and vicious and unsparing. Rivalries and privilege are sedimented through caste domination. The police exist only in name, mere puppets to do the bidding of upper-caste goons. The first half is riddled with how suffocating being in this world can get, despite the supposed shield of caste endowments. Subbu strains under the weight of such expectation, the burden of having to fit into a restrictive masculinity. Even the flashbacks, which have the key to Subbu’s own journey of becoming, come off as expository rather than something that flow in tandem. The titular character shifts in how she’s taken to be understood. She turns from someone whom we initially think he fancies to a source of his own liberation.

There’s veritable power in few latter scenes as the two friends re-negotiate their relationship that comes at stake amidst caste honour and self-aggrandising macho display. While one has crossed over, the other grapples to accept. Rishikanth is superb in all the inner wrestling as Karthi’s imbibed notions of masculinity are tested. Just as we warm up to these reckonings, the film pivots once again, a leap that has the seeds of a powerful climax but doesn’t ring quite as organic. Ultimately, Dorothy unfolds as a cautionary tale for straight filmmakers in precisely what they should be wary of before flinging together a lazy, convenient bunch of tropes disguised as bold interventions.