Thar Review

In the last few years, Hindi cinema has come up with some exciting stories that are as much a part of the American Western genre, as they are a subversion of it. If Sonchiriya was a breathtaking reminder of how the dacoits that the cinema of the 1970s and 80’s demonized had a horrified, humane side to them, Thar subverts one of the most iconic Hindi films – Sholay – in asking us an interesting question. Who is the real antagonist?

Writer-director Raj Singh Chaudhary develops this hybrid-genre narrative where the idea of an antagonist is more a case of perspective than actions. He does that by taking elements of a Western and blending them with the revenge-drama genre. The results are not always on the right pitch, but the film gets a lot of what it is trying to attempt right.

In its wonderful opening few minutes, Thar begins with Inspector Surekha Singh (Anil Kapoor) giving a voiceover. He establishes the setting of the That desert (near the Pakistan border) as the protagonist. This is established a number of times through the exquisite camera work of Shreya Dev Dube, who captures the geography of the film not just as a character, but as the soul that defines the film.

Singh is on the verge of retirement and is greeted with a “bhawandar” just before his retirement. He is accompanied by Bhure (Satish Kaushik), his professional junior and friend, as Siddharth (Harshvardhan Kapoor), a new mysterious man enters their town just as a body is found hanging by the tree, dismembered, and theft of drugs takes place amidst an air of deceit around an arranged marriage.

These are untrustworthy people with a questionable moral radar. Everyone has deep insecurities and hidden agendas, but the narrative remains loyal to Siddharth as his brooding, mysterious-new-man image grows into an antagonistic presence. Amidst a lot of torturing and traumatizing sequences is Chetna (Fatima Sana Shaikh), the wife of one of the three local men who are employed under Siddharth.

The film remains an intriguing watch while Siddharth remains an unknown presence. Chaudhary builds the tension intelligently, making a growing romantic track between Siddharth and Chetna seem like an inevitable tide towards doom that seems as natural as it looks uncomfortable.

He interjects these visuals smartly, juxtaposing the actions of the protagonist, and his love-making with this subordinated, silenced woman to keep whispering to us that this is going to end in an unhinged heartbreak for Chetna, the one character who seems to be untouched by the harsh greyness of the terrain that is her home.

The problem with Thar is its unsatisfying final act. After all the agonizing violence and almost inappropriate obsession with graphic details, the pay-off is not worth it. I understand how it may have looked like a good end on paper, but the execution feels quite damp. The only person you care for during those final few minutes are Chetna, who is never given the center stage in the narrative until that point.

There is a shot towards the end of the film of people lying dead on the sandy terrain, unmistakably similar to each other. A voiceover (written by Anurag Kashyap along with the rest of the dialogues) talks about the futility of revenge. An underlying theme of the absence of any value to life in a lawless, rugged world appears cursorily, but the film fades away before making its point land with the needed poignancy.

In another world, Thar would have been a worthy successor to Abhishek Chaubey’s brilliant directorial Sonchiriya, but this one falls a few crucial points behind. That is not to say that Thar is not a good film. It works in ways that few films do and stays with you like an uncomfortable mirror of life around us – a look at a lawless place from the past that speaks of the law-bound reality of our now. And yet, steers away from being a truly compelling cinematic work.

Now Streaming on Netflix

A Thursday Review

A week after Badhaai Do proved that the vague notion of a spiritual sequel can work on occasions, comes A Thursday a spiritual sequel of Neeraj Pandey’s 2008 directorial A Wednesday. Unlike the former, this one works as an unintentional antithesis to the Shah-Kher-starrer. A Thursday works best as a reminder of how problematic the premise of A Wednesday was, hiding the right-wing politics of its filmmaker that found its bloom with Akshay Kumar in later films.
Starring Yami Gautam Dhar, the film revolves around a nursery teacher who takes sixteen kids hostage on what appears to be a random Thursday. Writer-director Behzad Khambata diverts from the predecessor in keeping the stakes more personal here than societal (while also making a sweeping comment on the society).
The film begins well. We meet Naina (Dhar), a teacher who appears to be nothing short of an angel. She remembers the birthday of kids, offers them a safe space, makes them laugh, and feel like they have a trustworthy adult in her. As it turns out, there is more to her than her friendly side.
Khambata does well to build the tension. The stakes are high. More visible in its individualism than A Wednesday. But despite a solid, potentially career-best performance by Yami Gautam Dhar, one wonders if her inability to grasp the role by its throat right from the word go, makes one waver off their attention.
Her performance gets better, and with a stalwart like Atul Kulkarni, and a guest appearance by Dimple Kapadia giving the movie some of its best moments, the film remains watchable if not intriguing. The problem though is how Khambata weaves the social commentary in this world of a thrilling hostage situation. Neeraj Pandey had the luxury of a terrific Naseeruddin Shah at his disposal to deliver a powerful monologue.
To be honest, even that monologue felt a little dragged, and dramatic. But it was Shah who still brought an earnestness to that moment that hid the obvious writing flaws that threatened to dismantle the good work done in the first hour of that movie. Here the weight of a screenplay desperate for some socio-cultural gravitas crumbles too dramatically for Dhar to save it from becoming an easily forgettable film.
A Thursday is a film that fits a very specific sub-genre that bloomed in 2018. The sub-genre did not work then, and in 2022 it feels nothing more than a few artists stuck in a time-loop where they feel an idea that worked in a very specific context in 2008 will work fourteen years later too.
Now Streaming on Disney+Hotstar

Cycle Review

In Devashish Makhija’s short film Cycle, he turns his eye towards the wrath of a tribal community, and the systematic brutality they go through, forcing them to be rebels, living a life defined by isolation, fear, and one where guns become an unlikely, indispensable ally in their hope of a safe life.

The film opens with a horrifying sequence of uniformed officers (army men) scathing a gathering of a tribal community. There are no uncomfortable visuals, but just hints of the ensuing violence, and a slideshow of frightened faces of innocent tribals. The dialogues do the work of conveying the horrific truth of these invasions by armed forces in the world of these tribals. There are commands given to rip these people off their clothes, as they are held against their will – their arms and legs lifted from the ground.

Makhija employs a number of creative techniques throughout this film to make it both real and brutal, that goes, both, in favour and against the film. Shot as three single-shot scenes punctuated by a distinct shift in tone, the film – shot on a phone camera – is designed to give a sense of urgency, a seizure of panic, that makes you feel the constant fear that these people live in on a regular basis.

What it also provides is the borrowed calm of the following day. There is a fantastic sequence where one person sings a song nonchalantly, while another woman sits at a distance, chopping off her hair as if there is something deeper, darker, more sinister going on in her head. That one frame reflects how the invasion of those men gives birth to different responses in these people. Not all are driven by anger, but the fear of another attack and the agony of the previous one takes control of their sense of self, and their obsession to see violence as the only refuge.

However, the realism invoked by Makhija’s filmmaking can also work as a deterrent to the experience of the film’s viewership. As the title suggests, the film tries to expand on the cyclic relationship of police brutality and an aggressive response from the tribal community. It is an idea – a structure – that is devoid of a moving plot by design. Theoretically, it makes sense and the searing discomfort Makhija aims for is achieved. But this also makes the nineteen-minute runtime of the film feel longer than it is.

The sheer absence of movement, and in extension a resolution of the plot might make the film seem a little dissatisfying to some, but the brilliance of the film lies in the very suspension of these normative ideas. Cycle does not have a beginning or an end. It does not give us the luxury of letting us feel that the opening scene is the beginning of an onslaught. It is just one of many onslaughts that uniformed men force upon these people. The latter half of the narrative, too, is not ripe with a sense of an ending. It ends as abruptly as it begins, giving us shades of lives rarely recognized, but not the comfort of knowing that things are any closer to getting better for them. Unlike a cycle that defines the movement, Cycle is a snapshot of a life, a community, and Makhija is aware here that sometimes just a static snapshot can be fierce enough to send freeze viewers into a sense of informed discomfort.

Mardaani 2 Review

 

There is a problem when rape becomes an opportunity – a film-making device – and not a deeply felt, understood experience. Any heinous crime emerges out of an intrinsic socio-cultural ideology which cannot be completely understood in broad, selective strokes. Director Gopi Puthran makes the mistake of taking rape as a notion – a statistical game – and in that fails to touch the gut-wrenching brutality of the experience of it.

Mardaani 2 is a commercial film. It has all the qualities of one (excluding an item number – which also became a promotional device) and that stands in its way of becoming a moving thriller. Rape is simply the reason for Shivani Roy (Rani Mukherjee) to be the most untethered voice of women empowerment in Hindi cinema.

The problem is that the film is not consistent about its devotion towards the theme of rape. There is a thread involving a politician which feels unnecessary in a film that has no aspirations to make a political statement. In another unrelated thread, we see a domestic rivalry between Roy and a sexist colleague of hers which is left hanging in the balance, never reaching a conclusive end. These threads dilute, and ultimately force you to question the honesty behind the filmakers’ decision to set the story around a rape.

In looking at rage as a chain reaction to rape, the film hints at a dangerous idea of taking the law in one’s hands, something that feels uncomfortable in a narrative where your protagonist is a DSP. Law takes a back seat here and public sentiment becomes the driving force of the narrative. The purpose here is not to show the lawful way through rape crimes but to give the kind of fatality to the perpetrator’s arc that runs right into the dominant demand of our times.

This worked in NH10 where Meera (Anushka Sharma) resorted to killing those who had murdered her injured husband. Meera was a civilian stuck in a horrendeous situation, left with no option but to run her car over the killers. Here, Shivani is a DSP, and to see her beat the criminal in the middle of the road, and worse give the belt to other victims to take out their revenge, is distasteful and as dangerous as Simmba’s pro-fake encounter point of view.

For a film like this, the antagonist is an important cog. Vishal Jethwa plays the role of a maniac teenager quite well. He uses society’s sympathy towards persons with disability to his advantage, and carries a one-tone (effective in parts) rage towards women with a voice, ensuring that his reasons for the crimes are not sexual but patriarchal in nature. Mardaani 2 does well to put this idea out in the open, breaking the construct of rape seen as a sexual crime. But constant breaking of the fourth wall deters the impact this character should make, bringing the audience too close to the actions on screen. A thriller works best when there is a distance between the criminal and the viewer/reader. In giving their antagonist the ability to break the fourth wall almost at will, the makers once again turn towards sensationalizing little moments in the script rather than underplaying them.

Mardaani 2 is not the worst movie to come out this year, but it is a film that continues to carry the baggage of its predecessor. This franchise is essentially an opportunity for Rani Mukherjee to give us well-timed reminders of her acting abilities while giving us “pop-feminism”, a sensationalized take on an important issue which is all a design created so that Shivani Roy can be the one-cop-wonder. The “mardaani” female officer, and the oxymoronic tragedy of the last line is the basic flaw in the very structure, name and intention of these films. This one might be marginally better than the first one, but in 2019, we deserve a more insightful, intelligent take on a crime like rape.