“Gone Kesh” is a film written and directed by debutant Qasim Khallow and produced by Dhiraj Ghosh. The movie stars Shweta Tripathi, Jitendra Kumar, Vipin Sharma, Deepika Amin, and Brijendra Kala.
The film portrays Enakshi Dasgupta of Siliguri, West Bengal, who loves to dance. Over time, one day, 15-year-old Enakshi notices the first bald spot on her head. She realizes that her hair is rapidly falling.
She becomes the object of jokes, and gradually she starts avoiding going to school. Later on, in the film, she suffers from alopecia. She and her family start searching for the cure, but due to an unaffordable diagnosis, she loses hope of getting her hair back and starts using a wig in college, where a boy named Sujoy starts liking her but could never express it.
She starts doing the job as a salesgirl in some mall; she, along with her family, has a continuous fear of who will marry a girl who doesn’t have hair, so much so that she loses all faith that she will ever get married. Then, one fine day she saw a poster of a dancing competition that would happen in the mall.
She finally regained the confidence to dance again on the stage and face people, and hence she resigned from the job and participated in the competition. Meanwhile, the reality of her hair is revealed in front of Sujoy, who accepts her in whatever way she is.
She gathers courage finally. When she has to dance on stage, all of a sudden, her wig falls. But the end scenes show that now she has the confidence to come up with all her reality. As a person who doesn’t have hair and doesn’t care about this anymore, she is now comfortable with identity and body.
Analysis Of The Film
The movie talks about the normative hair culture where people, especially women, assume beauty only if they have hair-beautiful, long, smooth, thick. And if that is not there, then what? – is not even a question because it is assumed that a girl (especially) cannot lose hair because that is the most beautiful thing one should have. So in the patriarchal society, it is seen as the representative of femininity.
“Gone Kesh” can be seen as a very progressive movie. Still, deep down, it remains only a kind of rom-com for me. The film failed to talk about the protagonist’s internal journey towards self-acceptance. The only concern was in the entire movie whether she would ever get married, and even she had this dilemma of if you don’t have hair, nobody will marry her.
Only after getting acceptance from Sujoy did she get courage, and interestingly, she never wanted to express that. It was suddenly, maybe due to her fault, that Sujoy got to know about her disease. Neither the film shows much about the school bullies, although the movie at certain scenes talked about the bully.
Still, it was not much of concern for the directors; neither did they show how the school itself worked up on this kind of bully, or rather do they even care about this kind of bullies? No struggle has been there regarding the college; the movie was a bit fast in showing romantic scenes more than the struggle of a person living in this institution where a woman and beautification is associated with the kind of hair one has.
It was interesting to see how Enakshi responds in the first scene when she has diffidence while coming in front of the boy for a marriage proposal and the kind of courage she shows when she just lowered her wig.
Still, it was more complex for me to understand why she never stopped those bullies or maybe how she struggled during her college time, how she got the job, and why she chose a job as a salesgirl when she always wanted to be a dancer.
What kind of struggle she faced during these job opportunities, why she never got the courage to accept herself, why she had to use a wig all the time, even on the job site, without telling anybody about her disease. Further, she never gets the courage to talk about this disease to Sujoy.
Still, the circumstances let her discuss that, which concluded positively as Sujoy accepted her and loved her more. But in all of these, one thing that constantly remained with me was did she acknowledge the journey, the struggle, the challenges she faced.
Did she come up with all courage due to herself and struggle or the support she got from her surroundings (Surjoy especially)? It also has an essential question: why do women always need validation in terms of a romantic partner or somebody to accept themselves.
One another exciting thing that the movie likely showed was the caste angle. In one of the scenes, Enakshi’s aunty is more concerned about the wig she is using because plastic wigs are good than natural hair’s wig since they don’t know to whom it belongs, of which jati (caste) or dharma (religion).
Another thing is how middle-class families struggle and sacrifice for their kids. For instance, due to the unaffordable health infrastructure, Enakshi’s family has to sacrifice their visit to Taj Mahal due to the diagnostic expenses. It is interesting to see how movies nowadays talk about various diseases.
Still, the only concern that I found is the issues in the context of body positivity or the issue with self-acceptance or how society becomes a base of struggle that this movie fails to show.