Some Things Change:
The Graduate, the highly acclaimed 1967 film, directed by Mike Nichols from a novel by Charles Webb, was converted to a stage production by Terry Johnson, much later. In Mumbai, Trishla Patel, who says she was a fan of the film, has directed The Graduate, starring Tejaswini Kolhapure, Shashank Vishnu Dutt and Garima Yajnik; the plot would have been improbable half a century back, and would still be so in any society, however advanced.
The character of 21-year-old recent graduate Ben (played by Dustin Hoffman in his breakthrough role) is at a loose end during the summer holidays, and embarks on a secret affair with a beautiful older woman, Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft), who has a first name, Judith, but is always called Mrs Robinson to brand her property of her husband. She is in a loveless marriage with a man she was forced to marry because she got pregnant and there was no escape. The affair by itself would have been atypical, but Ben falls in love with his lover’s daughter, Elaine (Katherine Ross).
Now, there are terms for older women in affairs with younger men—cougar being one of the less offensive ones. In 1967, the writer or director did not explain if this was Mrs Robinson’s first seduction of a younger man, or why she chose Ben, who was not particularly charming. The difference between then and now is the way Mrs Robinson is perceived – half a century ago, she was a sad but wicked woman who ensnared Ben. Seeing the film from Ben’s point of view, he was seen as an angsty rebel who does not fit into his parents’ bourgeois suburban existence. His affair with Mrs Robinson was just a rite of passage for him, but she deserved to be punished. Her husband decides to divorce her, and and her daughter picks Ben over her family. When the film completed 50 years and was looked at again, Mrs Robinson was treated with much more respect and sympathy, and Ben perceived as what he really was, an “insufferable creep,” (to quote Roger Ebert, who did an about turn on his earlier review, as did some other critics).
Patel has ignored all the moral dilemmas of the plot, and turned it into a raunchy comedy, with some actors attempting American accents, some not. All the lines spoken in all seriousness in the film, made today’s audiences burst into laughter. We live in an age when risqué content is easily available on phones and computers. Any permutation and combination of temporary couplings evoke little shock or moral outrage. Less judgmental urban audiences would have no trouble rooting for the sexy and adventurous-in-bed Mrs Robinson over her vapid daughter. If Ben decides to end up with Elaine, he is an idiot, heading for just the kind of bland life from which Mrs Robinson briefly rescued him. As for Mrs Robinson, now Ben is a rite of passage for a woman who seeks and gets what she desires. The lyrics of the Simon & Garfunkel song, Mrs Robinson have the lines:
And here’s to you Mrs Robinson
Jesus loves you more that you will know
God bless you please, Mrs Robinson
Heaven holds a place for those who pray
We’d like to know a little bit about you for our files
We’d like to help you learn to help yourself
(This is a modified version of a piece that appeared in The Free Press Journal dated September 22, 2023)
