Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani? review: Dark film that explains the making of a murderer, rapist

First-time director Jiju Antony has chosen to tell the point of view of a perpetrator in the Marathi film, Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani? (The Forsaken). Set in Mumbai, which is included as a character in the film, Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani? opens with a funeral; a coffin is being lowered into the ground on a gloomy, rainy day.

Thereafter comes the scheduled hanging of Prashant Jadhav (Sanal Aman), a taxi driver convicted of rape and murder. He wails as he is taken to the gallows. This sequence of the film is labelled ‘The convict’.

There are ten more sequences after this ranging from ‘The prisoner’ to ‘The slave’ to ‘The Orphan’ that all explain how one Prashant Jadhav came to a point in his life where he was driven to rape and murder.

Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani? is told in reverse order and you see the frustrated taxi driver navigating the streets of Mumbai in the second sequence, ‘The Murderer’. As the song from Tees Maar Khan (2010) ‘Sheila Ki Jawani’ plays on the radio, he eyes a young woman crossing the street in the crowd.

Later that night, we meet his victims — a young couple returning home from a movie. Prashant takes them to a secluded place on the pretext of dropping off a parcel and brutally assaults and kills the boyfriend. He rapes the girl and in a rage, murders her with a stone.

The next few sequences show Prashant’s world in Mumbai. He lives with four other migrant workers in a small cramped room. They pass time by watching pornography. He stops by to see a prostitute (Rajshri Deshpande) who taunts him for his previous visit when he had panicked and left. He beats her up, sexually assaults her and leaves.

In the next sequence called ‘The slave’, the film changes to a sepia tone and we see Prashant as a driver for a woman and her young child. He is commanded at all times and berated for many a small things. When he uses the bathroom at her house and is reprimanded for ‘forgetting his place’, he leaves the job.

Further sequences show how he came to the city alone after the suicide of his sister, how he turns to stealing wallets at Juhu beach and selling drugs to make ends meet. One sequence shows the teenage Prashant working as a labourer in a buffalo dairy shed, with hopes of learning to drive.

In the sequence titled ‘The orphan’, now in black and white, a ten-year-old Prashant lives in a church-run school with other boys. The priest there takes special interest in him – giving him his favourite food, apple and letting him watch cartoons. He molests Prashant one night and the boy escapes, resorting to a life on the streets.

Antony takes the audience all the way to Prashant’s childhood when he was a happy young boy with a family. But the inside story is that his father abuses his mother; she in turn leaves for another man, running with her youngest child, a boy. Prashant’s father shifts his rage on his daughter and dumps Prashant at the church-run school.

Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani? attempts to delve into the psyche of a murderer and rapist, to show how the events of his life have moulded him. It was an extremely uncomfortable viewing for me, the film felt like a justification, rather than an explanation. It is not necessary that someone who was molested at a young age, grows up to become a sexual predator himself/herself, but this seems to be the case here.

Prashant is someone who has tendencies of violent rage and frustration that goes beyond his childhood experiences. He is also cruel towards animals, and I believe, is psychopathic. To make up for the lack of power in his life, he asserts power on others, namely in his encounters with the prostitute and the young dating couple.

The film presents a case that could be used for a re-evaluation of Prashant's death penalty, but I didn’t find any redeeming qualities in the man. That said, the adult actor who plays him, Sanal Aman, is quite good. In total, there are four actors who take the audience through Prashant’s life.

Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani? is a crowdfunded feature film, made with guerrilla techniques. Jiju Antony, incidentally, doesn’t speak Marathi himself. For a first-time filmmaker, Jiju displays considerable skill. The film is edited by Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, the director of S Durga, which is also playing at the 19th Mumbai Film Festival.

The film’s title, Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani?, refers to a quote from the Bible, which translates as, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”.

Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani? was screened at the 19th MAMI Mumbai Film Festival on 15 October 2017.