REVIEW 677: BADLA

Release date:	March 8, 2019
Director:	Sujoy Ghosh
Cast: Language:	Taapsee Pannu, Amitabh Bachchan, Tony Luke Kocherry, Amrita Singh, Tanvir Ghani, Manav Kaul Hindi

Two people are found by the police in a hotel room in the European countryside. One of them, a photographer called Arjun Joseph (Tony Luke Kocherry, credited here as Tony Luke), is lying dead, while the other, the renowned businessperson Naina Sethi (Taapsee Pannu) is injured. The woman claims that there was an unidentified third party within those four walls with them, although no one was seen leaving and all possible exits were in any case secured from inside.

Her guilt as a murderer is therefore assumed, but Ms Sethi will have none of that. She hires an expensive lawyer called Badal Gupta whose expertise in ‘preparing’ witnesses is legendary in legal circles since he has not lost a single case in a 40 year career. His mantra: “Kanoon wahi sach maanta hai jo saabith kiya ja sakta hai.” (The law believes to be the truth that which can be proved.) Badla begins with this tall, bearded man (Amitabh Bachchan) arriving for a meeting with Sethi to hear her account of events. The narrative unfolds in a series of flashbacks as she tells him what transpired between her and Joseph. 

Writer-director Sujoy Ghosh’s Badla (Revenge) is the Hindi remake of the Spanish crime thriller Contratiempo a.k.a. The Invisible Guest, written and directed by Oriol Paulo, and currently streaming on Netflix. The adapted screenplay – replete with references to the Mahabharat – has been attributed to Ghosh while Paulo has been duly acknowledged as the writer of the original story in the Hindi film’s credits.

Contratiempo and Badla belong to the sub-genre of thrillers where the viewer hears several versions of the truth narrated by various people, some who have credibility because they were present at the site and some who may not necessarily have been there. If you are listening and watching carefully enough, you may spot at least two gaping loopholes much before the big reveal. This is a fault of the written material by Paulo, not Ghosh’s direction or the acting. For instance, the story is pivoted on the extreme and uncharacteristic inefficiency of one of the individuals involved, and calls for considerable suspension of disbelief from anyone who notices this flaw.

Ghosh’s direction is, in fact, efficient as is Monisha R. Baldawa’s editing while they aim at having us guess who is to be believed and who not. Badla’s DoP is Avik Mukhopadhayay whose work on Shoojit Sircar’s October last year was sheer genius. Here he gives us elegant shots of Scotland’s natural beauty along with cleverly chosen frames featuring the various players in this psychological cat and mouse game between the storyteller and the audience.

The end result is a satisfying whodunit which, while certainly not brilliant, is suspenseful enough and occasionally eerie enough, especially when outdoors, to be entertaining while it lasts.

Pannu, like the film, is effective but not great. So is Bachchan.

The handsome model turned Malayalam film actor Tony Luke (Oozham, Sakhavu) makes his Hindi debut with Badla, and delivers the most impressive performance of the lead trio. As is expected in such films, with each retelling of the goings-on between Sethi and Joseph their characters change, sometimes marginally, sometimes dramatically. This good-looking young star lends subtlety even to the dramatic transformation in Joseph in one of the versions. I also love the fact that he does not camouflage his Malayalam accent when he speaks Hindi here – an interesting choice by the actor and his director. 

Amrita Singh has a crucial role in the film. Playing a distraught mother, she gives her character a convincing emotional graph as demanded by the screenplay without once devolving into Bollywood’s stereotypical over-wrought Maaaaaa.

Sujoy Ghosh is a leading light among thriller makers in Bollywood. His Kahaani (2012) starring Vidya Balan set new standards for the industry in this area. The pressure to live up to expectations raised by that film did show in the writing of the climax for Kahaani 2 (2016), but he reminded us of his unmistakable talent for mystery with director Ribhu Dasgupta’s unfortunately underrated Te3n (2016) starring Balan, Bachchan and Nawazuddin Siddiqui, which he produced. Maybe some day he will replicate the brilliance of Kahaani, but today what he has given us is Badla: if you are not in too demanding a mood, this is an enjoyable film.

Rating (out of five stars): **3/4

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	120 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/badla-movie-review-taapsee-pannu-and-amitabh-bachchan-team-up-for-a-moderately-satisfying-thriller-6222101.html

Poster courtesy:

https://www.facebook.com/RedChilliesEnt/  

REVIEW 676: SONCHIRIYA

Release date:	March 1, 2019
Director:	Abhishek Chaubey
Cast: Language:	Sushant Singh Rajput, Bhumi Pednekar, Manoj Bajpayee, Ranvir Shorey, Ashutosh Rana, Sampa Mandal, V.K. Sharma, Khushiya Hindi

“You haven’t got it?” one woman tells another, castes “are all meant to categorise men. Women are a different caste altogether, below all of them.”

In a film filled with more movement than conversations, words are used sparingly, but when they come they are on point. Women too are present in limited numbers, but the ones we encounter are prime movers in the battles being chronicled here. Writer-director Abhishek Chaubey’s Sonchiriya is a lyrical account of a gang of dacoits wandering the Chambal ravines, some of them anxious for a way out. 

Dreary, poetic and desperately sad, it is about unwritten codes of honour among society’s outliers,  about the cruelty of caste and patriarchy, and about the endlessness of violence once unleashed. “Dacoits too can be good,” says a character more than once. But this is not an effort to romanticise the outlaws in the frame so much as to highlight the self-defeating nature of social inequity in a world where men think patriarchy benefits them though it can pull them down mercilessly too. 

Deaths are the bookends between which unfolds this tale of a band of male dacoits led by Man Singh (Manoj Bajpayee) in Madhya Pradesh of the 1970s. Just once does one of these men refer to them as daaku. Otherwise, in their vocabulary they are baaghis (rebels) on the run. As they are hunted unrelentingly by the police, it becomes clear that at least some of them are trying much harder to escape their own demons than the long arm of the law.

We know nothing about their background beyond the fact that they are Thakurs, and that Man Singh and his younger associate Lakhan/Lakhna (Sushant Singh Rajput) are haunted by a sorrow that they seem unable to and unwilling to shrug off. Elsewhere in these arid lands, we hear that (the now legendary) Phoolan Devi (called Phuliya in the film and played by Sampa Mandal) is thirsting for the blood of Thakurs – but not all of them. Lakhna, it is clear, is fighting a fight he no longer believes in or takes pride in. Vakil Singh (Ranvir Shorey), for his part, does not trust Lakhna. Rounding off the primary players is the policeman Virender Gujjar (Ashutosh Rana) whose determination to clean up the Chambal seems to be as personal as it is professional.

Sonchiriya, which is written by Chaubey and Sudip Sharma, rarely misses a step. Like Chaubey’s three previous directorial ventures – Ishqiya, Dedh Ishqiya and Udta Punjab – it is rooted in the soil from which it emerges. This rootedness is reflected in every element of the film, from the dialect the characters speak (accompanied by subtitles which will hopefully give it the pan-India audience it deserves) to their clothing and concerns. This film has more depth than the more widely promoted, far flashier Udta Punjab though. And like the two Ishqiyas, it is uncompromising and unapologetic about what it has to say.

His direction of Sonchiriya is steeped in conviction. Except for perhaps three brief scenes in which the momentum is intentionally slowed down to needlessly heighten the melodrama – when a group of men realise that they have killed the wrong person/s, while a mother is telling her son his truth, and in the end between Lakhna and the titular character – not a single moment of this narrative feels out of place or unnecessary.

Chaubey’s canvas is enriched by production designer Rita Ghosh, fresh from her superb work on Nandita Das’ Manto last year, and by DoP Anuj Rakesh Dhawan’s ability to turn dust bowls into visual gold. Dhawan does not give us pretty frames here. His unsparing cinematography does nothing to lighten the impact of the harsh landscapes these characters traverse on their way to what seems like nowhere. Even the river is not prettified although it does provide some relief to the eyes. The audience is shown a lot of the violence that occurs, but not in a lascivious fashion.

The most bloody murder of the story, however, takes place off camera as one human being vents a long-burning rage against another, and sound designer Kunal Sharma, while not resorting to sensationalism, ensures that we know exactly what is going on without seeing any of it.

The ensemble cast is brimming with talent.

Bhumi Pednekar is flawless as the beleaguered woman who intrudes on the gang’s existence. With just four feature films under her belt (Dum Laga Ke Haisha, Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, Shubh Mangal Saavdhan and now this one), Pednekar has already emerged as one of the most versatile young actors on the Hindi film horizon.

All the grime and misery on the planet cannot camouflage Sushant Singh Rajput’s handsomeness, yet the actor ensures that what stands out is his character’s bruised and broken spirit. There are a couple of seconds here and there when Manoj Bajpayee’s facial expressions come across as exaggerated, but for the most part he is as fabulous as Man Singh as he usually is.

Commercial Hindi filmdom is either indifferent to, ignorant about or afraid of caste as a subject, as we were reminded most recently by the shameful manner in which it remade the Marathi film Sairat as Dhadak. The industry is also largely a patriarchal space, usually telling stories of men or portraying women through a restricted male gaze. Abhishek Chaubey’s new film, on the other hand, is a commentary on how, while oppressive systems crush the marginalised, the cycles of violence unleashed by dominant communities end up sweeping away everyone including the oppressors and in particular the few who wish to surrender their inherited privilege. Sonchiriya is unafraid, it is aware and it cares.

Rating (out of five stars): ****

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	146 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/sonchiriya-movie-review-sushant-singh-rajput-bhumi-pednekar-and-a-band-of-fine-artistes-deliver-aching-desolate-beauty-6175821.html

Poster courtesy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonchiriya