Release date:
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May 6, 2016
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Director:
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Rajesh Pillai
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Cast:
Language:
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Manoj Bajpayee, Jimmy
Sheirgill, Divya Dutta, Kitu Gidwani, Prosenjit Chatterjee, Parambrata Chattopadhyay,
Nikita Thukral, Vishal Singh, Amol Parashar
Hindi
|
The road to cinematic achievement
is lined with films that made it to the interval mark and then were ruined by
their own contrivances. Traffic is a case
study in what not to do with your story after the half-way post.
Based on a Malayalam screenplay
by Bobby and Sanjay, which led to the well-received 2011 film of the same name,
this remake is adapted for Hindi viewers by scriptwriter Suresh Nair with
dialogues by Piyush Mishra and Prashant Pandey. The late Rajesh Pillai directed
both films.
Traffic is inspired by a real-life
incident from 2008 in Tamil Nadu that was reported in the news media. The story
of the Hindi film version, as far as can be told without spoilers, is this: A 12-year-old
girl called Riya, daughter of filmstar Dev Kapoor (Prosenjit Chatterjee) and
his wife Maya (Divya Dutta), is struggling for her life in Pune. Meanwhile, newbie
journalist and road accident victim Rehaan Ali (Vishal Singh) is on a
ventilator in a Mumbai hospital. Doctors have virtually given up hope for him.
His parents (played by Kitu Gidwani and Sachin Khedekar) agree to donate their
son’s heart to save Riya. With time running out for her and all flights
grounded due to poor visibility, the organ must be transported 160km by road in
150 minutes.
Anyone who knows the madness of
Mumbai will understand what a near-impossible task that is. Constable Ramdas
Godbole (Manoj Bajpayee) steps up to make the impossible possible with the
support of his boss, Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic) Gurbir Singh (Jimmy
Sheirgill). As you would have figured from the trailer, Godbole and his
companions are making good time when their vehicle disappears.
The rest of the film is spent
figuring out what happened to them and whether they ultimately reach Pune
before it is too late for Riya.
This should have been a no-frills
thriller woven around a story of basic decency and humanity. The human element
is well handled in the first half leading the way to what should have been a
suspenseful second half. Those early gains are frittered away though by the
desperation to be a film with a message.
Traffic’s USP is the manner in which relationships
and power equations between characters are established: the father who is
brusque with his son even though he loves him, the young man whose feelings for
a woman are unaffected by socially prescribed barriers, a mother who rises
above her own grief to recognise the pain of another woman, the arrogance of a celebrity
even in the face of personal tragedy, influential people who pull strings undeterred
by the human life at stake and a police constable seeking redemption in the
eyes of his daughter after a high-profile bribery scandal.
All these points are effectively driven
home without being trumpeted from a rooftop. The moment loudness overtakes
subtlety though, the impact of the film is sadly diluted.
An early sign of this tendency
comes when a doctor lectures JCP Singh about doing his duty and taking a risk
to save a life. Police personnel make for convenient scapegoats in any given
situation because they are unpopular figures in public perception in India, but
the truth is that Singh’s concerns are valid and yet bombastically brushed
aside by the self-righteous doc. As it happens, no one asks him if he would
have made that call for a non-VIP patient.
Still, the first half of the film
offers sufficient compensation for that brief scene of populist overstatement.
The second half, however, fails to sustain the tone.
You may have noticed, without
this review rubbing it in, that the child needing a transplant in this story
has a Hindu name and her potential donor’s name is Muslim. Audiences are not
fools and can be left to draw whatever conclusion they choose without the point
being underlined, then circled with a red pen and further highlighted with a
bright yellow marker.
Having initially assumed that
viewers are intelligent and sensitive to our social reality, Team Traffic later succumbs to an
inexplicable urge to idiot-proof their film.
Firstly, the reason for the
disappearance of Godbole’s vehicle comes across as being contrived to introduce
a message about how everyone deserves a second chance in life. Next, the entire
inter-community component overshadows everything else in the film’s second half
with its in-your-face messaging, as golden-hearted Muslims clear hurdles in
Godbole’s path while a song discusses Allah and maula, declaring that religion and God are both the problem and its
solution.
Also thrown into the mix for good
measure is a well-meaning Christian briefly gone astray and doing penance for
his misdeeds. The only thing left was for them to put a turban on JCP Singh’s
head and have him deliver a sermon on Wahe Guru. Thankfully, that does not
happen, though the closing credits are accompanied by another musical reminder
about communal amity.
It is clear that in this film’s
mindscape – as it is with most mainstream Hindi cinema – minority community
members are strategically placed in stories with the specific purpose of
putting out some sort of lesson, not because they just happen to exist within
the country’s population.
Between the overt secularism of Godbole’s
experiences on the road and the repetition of the moral of the story in the
final song, the film gets back on track with a brief scene involving Rehaan’s
grieving parents and his girlfriend Aditi. That fleeting interaction is heartbreaking.
In fact, the two
most moving scenes in Traffic feature
low-key, low-volume phone calls: Maya Kapoor speaking to Mrs Ali, Dr Ali
reaching out to Aditi. Divya Dutta, Kitu Gidwani and Nikita Thukral (as Aditi)
are particularly wonderful through these moments, making the film their own
despite the presence of the ever-dependable Manoj Bajpayee and Jimmy Sheirgill
in much larger roles (both men are effective too).
If you have known the death of a loved one, you will understand how excruciatingly
hard it is to let go. The only thing worse than the anticipation and fear of
loss is loss itself. The feel of cold, lifeless
flesh that will never be warm again is like a knife through the heart. Drama is
intrinsic to these situations and to the larger, multi-cultural Indian reality,
without the crutch of high-decibel songs or explicit moralising. If Team Traffic had understood that, this could
have been a great film. As things stand, it is an uneven, unsatisfying ride.
Rating
(out of five): **1/2
CBFC Rating (India):
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UA
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Running time:
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104 minutes
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This
review has also been published on Firstpost:
Oh, I was looking forward to this one. Often, film makers fall prey to going over the top.
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