Satyajit Ray made Teen Kanya (THREE DAUGHTERS, ‘61) to commemorate the birth centenary of the Bengali cultural giant—poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, actor, educationist, painter—Rabindranath Tagore. It is noteworthy that Ray, a polymath himself, decided to concentrate on the three female protagonists of Tagore’s short stories from the volumes of poems, novels, short stories, dramas, essays and songs that Tagore left behind. May 2, 2021 marks Ray’s birth centenary and studying the expansive creative careers of both men often reveals several points of intersection.

Tagore’s women, like Ray’s, are complex—independent yet bound by tradition; inhabiting, as women do, the in-betweenness within a desire for boundless personal freedom and the socio-familial space that denies it to them. Teen Kanya is an anthology of three films: Postmaster with the young, orphaned protagonist Ratan (Chandana Banerjee); Monihara with the childless wife of a rich jute plantation owner Manimalika (Kanika Majumdar); and Samapti with the shrew-like “wild child” teenager Mrinmoyee (Aparna Sen). Incidentally, it is with Teen Kanya that Ray, too, found a seamlessness within his own creative pursuits, as he began to score music for his films.

Tagore’s “Postmaster”, written in 1891, tells the story of Ratan who works for her village’s Postmaster, the Anglophile Nandal from Calcutta (Anil Chatterjee). With Nandal’s arrival, Ratan, receives affection for the first time in her life. She learns how to read and write from him, makes him his meals and then takes care of him while he fights a bout of malaria. When, unable to tolerate village life anymore, Nandal hands in his resignation and Ratan’s world is robbed of the love she had begun to acclimatise to. While Tagore’s Ratan falls to the Postmaster’s feet, begging him not to leave her alone, Ray’s Ratan walks past Nandal and goes on attending to her household chores. Nandal breaks into tears as the potholed road ahead leads to his future back in the city; Ratan quietly lives out her destiny.

“Ray did not deny his women the right of choice. His women had agency. They were primary protagonists in their own right,” writes actor Sharmila Tagore who was 15 when she made her debut in Ray’s Apur Sansar (THE WORLD OF APU, 1959). Her words do not just ring true for Ratan but also for Manimalika and Mrinmoyee. The three women form the moral arc of the film, making the audience not just question the society but also the ways in which they, personally, inhibit women’s personal freedoms and ambitions.

Even within a horror story like Monihara, where the protagonist lives with a cavernous greed for gold and is probably unfaithful to her husband, Ray (and Tagore) divulge the psychology behind her greed. Manimalika feels judged by her in-laws because she hasn’t been able to bear her husband a child. As Sharmila Tagore says “Ray gifted his women protagonists the liberty which defied the cliché that the male desire is visual while the woman’s is sensory.” This obvious visual female desire, as heightened as it is in the protagonists’ sexual transgression in Charulata (THE LONELY WIFE, ‘64) and Ghare Baire (THE HOME AND THE WORLD, ‘84), finds a materialist incarnation in Manimalika’s unapologetic gold lust. When you reduce a woman to her womb, why should she find it in herself to be a holistic human being and not just a dehumanized, ever-widening lacunae of greed?

Her disappearance from her husband’s life does not leave behind a vacuum that he can fill with another wife who can perhaps bear him an heir. Instead, she haunts him, filling his existence with a hopeless wait and an obvious dread. It is not just a haunting of her husband’s life, but that of his ancestral home, the seat of long-standing patriarchy that perpetuates itself from one heir to another.

Aparna Sen, at 16, made her debut as Samapti’s Mrinmoyee, a bright-eyed, rebellious village teenager who wouldn’t toe the line of patriarchy and the way it expects “marriage worthy” young women to behave. When Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee) marries Mrinmoyee, only with the consent of her parents, she lashes out, refusing to bow down to a life of servile conjugality. Not only does she have a mind of her own, but she also insists upon sovereignty over her body, which is only its most authentic self when running through fields and sitting on swings. She runs away from her husband on the night of their wedding and spends it outdoors, sleeping on her beloved swing.

These women, and Ray’s later women like Charulata and Arati (MAHANAGAR, THE BIG CITY, ‘63), are well-versed in articulating a language of complex desire and longing through their bodies, even when they don’t have the verbal vocabulary for it. There is an insistence (in both Tagore and Ray’s works) of intellectual, economic and physical sovereignty by these women that, as pointed out by Sharmila Tagore, often predates the establishment of a formal women’s movement in India. They are the conscience of the texts they occupy, and this conscience is not a vague, moral or a spiritual one. Both Ray and Tagore embody this conscience within a female body that transgresses, fights and yet, always, desires.  

In Daisy von Scherler Mayer’s PARTY GIRL, New York City stands on a cusp, ready to burst into a new being, much like its 24-year-old protagonist Mary played by Parker Posey. The film was released in 1995, a year after then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani passed a law that is largely responsible for the astronomical rents in the city. Mary, therefore, could still afford to live in a Chinatown loft and pay rent selling off her stolen Gaultier clothes. It was a different and fast-changing New York City where white business owners had just begun to sell falafels, causing a loss of clientele for the Lebanese falafel stand right across the street. It was a New York City where the white female protagonist could still wear a bindi to go with her “Middle Eastern” outfit and not be called out.

PARTY GIRL, in many ways, is a coming of age tale—of both the city and the protagonist. It begins at a rave where we see Mary illegally charging guests a cover fee. She is wearing a red velvet blouse and a glittery mini skirt. When she gets arrested by the police, her godmother, a menopausal librarian Judy Lindendorf (Sasha von Scherler), bails her out. To earn all the money she owes to Judy, Mary starts working at the New York Public Library as a clerk and is made to face the formidable and purposefully opaque Dewey Decimal System. As her outfits get more and more subdued—less velvet, more cotton, less fishnet stockings and more plain leggings—Mary decides to conquer the Dewey Decimal System and get her life back on track. Mary’s clothes, of course, are a text that records her bildungsroman. The gaudy and shiny give way to solid colors, the unruly hair gets folded into a bun, the big hoop earrings are traded in for a brooch. On her birthday, wearing black business formals and a pair of glasses, Mary decides to go to graduate school and become a librarian. Thereby, deciding upon a career right in time before the city’s rising rents can drive Mary out of her home.

Popular culture is full of instances where studious, bespectacled female protagonists begin as bookish heroines till a desire for male attention and validation forces a transformation upon them and they metamorphosize into a sex object. PARTY GIRL is an extremely witty and feminist overturning of that portrayal. Mary, like the film’s name suggests, is a party girl. From the very beginning, she is the center of everyone’s attention and doesn’t need to do anything to become anyone’s love interest. Her transformation from the sexy, partying stereotype to someone who wants to be a librarian is essentially driven by ambition and the desire to turn her life around to afford to live in the city she calls home. Notably, it is her newfound ambition that helps her reject a former abusive boyfriend named Nigel (Liev Schreiber) and garner the affection of the cute Lebanese falafel seller, Mustafa (Omar Townsend).

Melvil Dewey, the inventor of the eponymous decimal system, wanted to employ women as librarians because he believed they could be underpaid. In Wayne A. Wiegand’s Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey, a book that was released in 1996, a year after PARTY GIRL, it is noted that Dewey had a history of sexual harassment and had forced himself upon many of his women subordinates. Mary’s decision to become a librarian, therefore, also becomes a reclaiming of Dewey’s legacy. She takes something that has been created by an extremely problematic man and reclaims it to attain financial independence and a social standing, something Dewey himself would have denied his female peers.

PARTY GIRL was the first film to premiere on the Internet. It then went on to play at Sundance, cementing Posey’s reputation as the “Queen of Indies.” Its quirk is a product of its times. “So decadent, so silly. So Mary!” a friend describes Mary in the film, and the same words could be used to describe New York City of 1995 and the film. A viewing of PARTY GIRL in 2020, however, sheds light on the many ways in which it is a limited narrative, even for a film released during its time. For a narrative extensively set in the underground party scene of downtown New York of the mid-’90s, especially within a post-voguing context, the cast remains almost homogeneously white.

One can also mourn the delegitimization of Mary’s eccentric, feminine side that (literally) gets schooled into conforming to an age-old order that demands propriety out of women. PARTY GIRL is not just a dirge sung to the passing, bohemian downtown New York City—the haunt of artists, the seat of LGBTQI activism and the vanishing bastion of carefree, slower lives that was soon to fall into the hands of real estate developers. It is also the swansong of the rave-hosting, blue satin glove wearing-Mary in leopard skin coats before she slips into something formal.