Pakistan Rupee Exchange Rate
Taxali Gate has many ambitions: it has to flaunt its politics, preach to its audience about consent and womanhood, pass for a rape-revenge film while aiming for a courtroom drama. Top this all with characters who want to save themselves by narrating their complexity instead of growing into it.
Director Abu Aleeha’s latest is able to accommodate all the above elements in a span of filmic three days that run on screen for roughly 95 minutes. However, the end product is an often confused rendering in a race against itself. It’s not only that the film is fraught with glaring technical errors but such rudimentary faults will end up taking a lot of space for well-meaning critics who would much rather discuss the streets and tales of Taxali Gate itself.
The case of sex work
Fictionalised portrayals of sex work, admittedly few in Pakistan, are always tricky waters to traverse. It’s rare to stumble upon narrativisation that does not crave victims or locate NGOised figures of empowerment. Saadat Hasan Manto’s Kali Shalwar and Shyam Benegal’s Mandi are two cases in point that take neither martyrs nor heroes and let women be women first.
Lahore’s historic red light district, Taxali Gate is better known as Heera Mandi as the film’s opening voiceover recounts. Thereon, the camera follows Shafiq (Yasir Hussain) through the infamous streets before he is introduced to the audience as a lovestruck pimp gathering clients for the sharp-witted Muskan (Ayesha Omar).
Enter caste
Aleeha’s most significant departure from the usual renditions of Heera Mandi would be to not premise all suffering on the prostitute. Enter Shafiq’s niece, Zainab (Mehar Bano) who is gang raped by her boyfriend and his friend (Umar Alam, Sheheryar Cheema) and must navigate the justice machinery as a lower-caste plaintiff.
Her father, Meeda/Abdul Hameed (Nayyer Ejaz), is an entertainer belonging to the Kanjar caste and no match for the rapist, shielded by his father Chaudhry Sheheryar’s privilege and pride. Despite the small odds of the family succeeding in court, as bluntly pointed out by Zainab’s attorney (Iffat Omar), legal proceedings commence within three days of the crime.
Unlike most courtroom dramas, a Pakistani legal battle hardly ever induces a will-they-won’t-they anticipation among audiences on the other end of the screen. It is written from the outset that a rape survivor’s victory will be nothing short of monumental and extraordinary. Practical on this account, Aleeha never offers any false hopes even when it largely seems that he’s the one putting the low-caste family through the system just to humiliate them, a sentiment that Zainab holds against Meeda.
In the courtroom
Aleeha might not take any visual liberties to exploit Zainab’s rape or Muskan’s business as usual but the courtroom’s incessant cross-questioning makes up for it under the guise of depicting reality. The exploits, in this case, aren’t one of pure sensationalism but a poorly acted and executed sequence that follows Chaudhry’s attorney (Alyy Khan) mocking the defendants in the presence of a blatantly biased judge just to push the film forward.
Unfortunately, the courtroom scenes are perhaps the only part of the film that feels complete and coherent if only to allow the actors to become heroes with grand speeches better suited to the cinema’s audience. Alyy Khan as the defence lawyer fashions his assault on #Me Too and ‘Mera Jism Meri Marzi’ with fervour only to fall dramatically silent upon a piquant lecture from Muskan.
