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Release
date:
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December 15, 2017
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Director:
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Amit Kumar
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Cast:
Language:
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Vijay Varma, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Neeraj Kabi, Geetanjali, Farhan
Mohammad Hanif Shaikh, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Onkar
Das Manikpuri
Hindi
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A young man is leaving for work
on the first day of his career as a police officer. His mother reminds him of
his late policeman father’s dictum: “There are three paths in life – the right
path, the wrong path and the middle path.” To this he, Sub Inspector Adi
Kulshreshtha, adds: “…and the day I find my own path, I will have peace of
mind.” He remembers too Dad’s cautionary note that the choice will not be easy.
Adi faces one such moral dilemma
early on. On a rainy night in the skinny bylanes of a Mumbai slum cluster, he
is chasing a murder suspect when they confront each other at a dead end. Many
stories have already been told about forks in the road and the what-ifs that
might unfold (or might have unfolded) depending on the turn you take. The
enjoyment in watching director Amit Kumar’s Monsoon
Shootout comes from the fact that he does not just lay out a series of
ethical, unethical and gray-area options before us to create suspense, but that
in painting each possible scenario, he also raises multiple questions about our
motivations for going with one or the other. Do you, for instance, pick the
right, wrong or middle path based on the dictates of your conscience or based
on the rewards you expect to reap from your actions? If all three paths cause
you the same suffering or bear the same fruit, would you bother with the one
you deem right?
As the audience and hero grapple
with these quandaries, Monsoon Shootout becomes
an interesting combination of suspense thriller and modern morality tale.
Kumar’s film has been in the
public eye for several years now. It was premiered at Cannes in 2013 and –
oddly, considering the commercial potential of the material and a marquee name
like Anurag Kashyap among its producers – has taken four years to come to
mainstream theatres in India. Thankfully, it is none the worse for the wear.
Monsoon
Shootout’s
on-point casting is one of its victories. Vijay Varma provides ample proof of
his chameleon-like abilities by metamorphosing into an innocent youngster with
carefully calibrated reactions who is just feeling his way around life, in
sharp contrast to the worldly wise, repugnant predator he played in Pink last year or the hero’s combustible
friend Pakiya in the lesser known
Rangrezz.
The questions confronting Adi are
fascinating, but the character itself is somewhat bland. That cannot be said of
the alleged axe murderer Shiva (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) and Adi’s boss Khan
(Neeraj Kabi) who remain attractively mysterious at all times. Siddiqui manages
to make Shiva marginally less or more menacing without any evident effort in
each of the four alternative episodes narrated in the film. In many of his
earlier works, he has summoned up that trademark mischievous look in his eyes
to give evil or irreverent characters an edge. Here that alluring glint is
gone. There is no smile to charm us, just a hardness that softens
microscopically with each telling.
By not trying to be either
likeable or repulsive to us, Kabi – who was simply electric as a priest in Ship of Theseus – ensures that with each
version of Adi’s tale, we begin to understand Khan just that little bit more.
Not like or dislike him, but understand what makes him tick.
Adi’s doctor friend Anu played by
the very striking Geetanjali Thapa (National Award winner for Liar’s Dice, credited here as only
Geetanjali) left me asking for more from the writing though. The nature of this
film is such that no character gets the in-depth treatment meted out to Adi,
which is fair enough, but Anu is the only central character who feels
superficial.
In fact, all the women in Monsoon Shootout operate on the
sidelines of Adi’s existence. Their actions barely impact the main premise of
this story, unlike the men whose life choices are crucial to Adi’s decisions
and who decisively take centrestage at points in the narrative.
Geetanjali manages to be
memorable despite her rather vanilla role.
Monsoon
Shootout is filled
to the brim with action and feels appropriately trim at barely 1.5 hours
running time. Rajeev Ravi’s intimate, low-lit frames and the background score
by Atif Afzal and Gingger Shankar add to the film’s intensity, with the camera
offering us a persistent blast of light and space in only two scenes: a murder
in the beginning and a fake encounter.
Considering its setting, it is
natural that the film is steeped in violence yet at no point is it in-your-face
gratuitously bloody. Atanu Mukherjee and Ewa Lind’s editing complements Amit
Kumar’s smart writing such that though I occasionally needed to mentally
retrace my steps through the narrative to recall when one version of Adi’s
what-if ended and the next began, far from being confusing the effort added to
the level of involvement in Monsoon
Shootout.
In the past couple of decades,
too many Hindi gangster films have smacked of a desire to impress with coolth,
a desire to be ‘international’ (read: draw from the gangs of Martin Scorcese
and Quentin Tarantino) or to borrow Ram Gopal Varma and Anurag Kashyap’s
voices. Amit Kumar may well be inspired by these gentlemen, but his
storytelling style in Monsoon Shootout
reveals a rootedness in his own individuality. He particularly distinguishes
his adventure from Varma and Kashyap’s filmography by not dipping too much into
the specifics of a local cultural milieu and lingo and by not opting for highly
stylised stunt choreography, but staying unwaveringly focused instead on Adi’s
moral dilemma.
Four years has been an unfairly
long wait for mainstream Indian theatre-goers, but our reward is a nicely
engaging film with several morally compelling questions at its core.
Rating
(out of five stars): **3/4
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CBFC Rating (India):
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UA
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Running time:
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92 minutes
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This review was also published on Firstpost:
Poster
courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsoon_Shootout
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