PROVOKED

What should be an "important" film about abused women instead comes across as a mediocre TV movie.

A woman puts up with years of abuse from her husband—from verbal assault to beatings and rape. Finally after a night of violence, she waits for her husband to fall drunkenly asleep. Pouring fuel over his body, she lights him on fire. He dies in the hospital, and she is sent to prison where, ironically, she feels free for the first time in her life.

The film is called Provoked, and from the title to the plot, it has Ashley Judd's name written all over it. Alas, it does not have anything to do with our favorite hit-back heroine, but is rather based on a true story of an immigrant Punjabi housewife who is thrown into prison for the murder of her husband in their London home. Women's rights activists helped this woman, Kiranjit Ahluwalia, appeal her sentence on the basis of self-defense after years of abuse, and her victory and release introduced "battered woman's syndrome" as a defense in the British court system.

It is too bad the movie isn't as interesting as the story demands.

Bollywood superstar Aishwarya Rai plays Kiran, the abused woman. The film opens as flames engulf a screaming man, who turns out to be her husband Deepak (Lost's Naveen Andrews). Dazed when the cops show up, Kiran never admits to NOT being the one who caused the fire, so she is thrown into jail, and is later convicted of murder when Deepak dies of his burns. Except for a big scary lesbian with bad teeth, prison turns out to be a rather amiable place to be, and slowly but surely Kiran makes friends, including Ronnie (Miranda Richardson) who teaches her the ways of life behind bars, including how to spell "shoulder" in Scrabble.

While Kiran is in prison, her case comes to the attention of women's rights activist Radha (Nandita Das) and her cohorts. With her help, plus some good connections, Kiran get the chance to appeal her case and finally have the truth come forward.

I don't know if it is the director's fault (as Aishwarya Rai is a truly dynamic actress in other films), but Kiran spends the whole film timidly cowering or staring out into space. She is a blank slate, occasionally stammering in broken English, and her character is only fleshed out by flashback scenes of violence with Deepak, who is also poorly developed. Ash pretty much has little to do except react to other characters.

Thank goodness for Miranda Richardson, who struts onto the screen with brassy and swaggering glory. By the sheer force of being a kick-ass actress, Richardson turns Ronnie into the most interesting character in the film, and you miss her when she is not around. She may be surrounded by a mediocre TV movie, but she manages to turn her scenes into big-screen quality. It is too bad for everyone else involved that the rest of Provoked (which is a truly important story) doesn't have the power that Richardson brings to the movie.