Release
date:
|
June 5,
2020
|
Director:
|
Anurag Kashyap
|
Cast:
|
Saiyami Kher,
Roshan Mathew, Parthveer Shukla, Amruta Subhash, Rajshri Deshpande, Upendra
Limaye
|
Language:
|
Hindi
|
Sarita Pillai nee
Sahastrabuddhe’s life mirrors the humdrum lives of millions of middle-class
Indian women. She wakes up every morning, cooks, prepares her kid
for school, sends him off before heading to her own office in teeming
Mumbai where she spends her day in mechanical, emotionless toil as a bank
teller before returning home to cook, serve her kid and husband Sushant,
admonish the latter for being a layabout, clean up and sleep.
Forward to the next
day. Wake up. Repeat. Sleep. And the next. And the next. Wake up.
Repeat. Sleep. Wake up. Repeat. Sleep.
Her listless
existence and her evident disinterest in Sushant are punctuated occasionally by
lively kitty parties with women in the neighbourhood who revel in gossip,
including about members of their own group.
We know from
the start that there is and will be more to Sarita, heroine of director
Anurag Kashyap’s Choked: Paisa Bolta
Hai (Money Talks) that is streaming on Netflix from today. We know we
can expect more than that surface mundaneness for two reasons: first, the
film’s smartly executed prologue indicates some hanky-panky with money; and
second, hints are dropped early on about an event in the past from where her
marriage went downhill.
Sushant for his
part has more spark and appears to have more going for him than she does
although he does nothing. He hangs around contributing zilch to the housework,
casually plays his guitar at home and plays carrom with friends in the
building. Sarita’s tetchiness towards him inexplicably does little to dampen
his affection for her or dull the twinkle in his eyes, but it also does not
enthuse him enough to lift a finger to share her burden around the house.
Then one day, as
the trailer has already revealed, Sarita unexpectedly comes across a stash of
cash and for the first time in the film we see her face come alive.
Choked is about what she does with that secret horde, and
through that adventure it tells the story of a life stuck in a rut, a
relationship at the edge of an abyss, greed and corruption in the era of
demonetisation.
At first Choked is intriguing. The manner in
which Kashyap portrays Sarita’s boredom and sense of hopelessness in her
role as wife and home manager is striking. Her act of latching a door and
switching off a light night after night after night before going to bed is used to remarkable effect
to underline the repetitiveness of her routine and the monotony that domesticity can bring.
Sarita’s empty eyes
and irritability when contrasted with Sushant’s easygoing nature and their son’s
charm allude to a background that must have been far more interesting than her
current busy yet godawfully drowsy routine.
Besides the lead
trio of Choked are a good
fit. Sarita is played by Saiyami Kher who had the misfortune of making her
Bollywood debut with Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s worst film till date, Mirzya (2016), but managed to reveal
her innate charisma even in that dismal enterprise. The young actor has an
impressive personality and speaking eyes. In the role of Sushant is the
attractive stage and Mollywood artist Roshan Mathew whose brief filmography
includes an aching portrayal of a man in love with a man in a conservative
society in Geetu Mohandas’s otherwise middling Moothon. And Parthveer Shukla who plays their son is a little
fireball of darlingness without the irritating precociousness that so many
directors seem to demand of their child actors.
Once the nuts and
bolts of their relationship and the neighbourhood dynamics are established
though, despite a series of twists and turns right till the end, the narrative
is curiously lacking in energy.
Sarita and Sushant’s
back story, from which the title Choked is
drawn, is not quite as fascinating as it is made out to be. His subsequent
irresponsible behaviour and the progression of their equation are unconvincing.
Kashyap and writer
Nihit Bhave appear to be making a point about Narendra Modi’s decision in 2016
to demonetise select Indian currency notes – the point being that the corrupt
and the powerful found their way around it, while ordinary citizens suffered.
However, they seem
to have internalised it so much, they say what they
seem to want to say so hesitantly and in such a roundabout, meandering manner,
that Choked almost comes
across as praise for demonetisation, a measure that has had a disastrous
impact on the Indian economy. There is even a song and dance featuring the hero
celebrating demonetisation that is placed prominently in the narrative. The collective effect of these
elements sadly dilutes the impact of the cheeky song that plays with the rolling
credits in the end. If Choked
is intended as a sarcastic critique, it depends too heavily on the viewer
being indulgent towards the director, being aware of his politics and
off-screen stances and having studied the country’s reaction to the present prime
minister.
And no ya, the play
on “choked” does not work either.
What does work is the constant
flow of dialogues between languages in the way they naturally might in the
Mumbai home of a couple in a mixed marriage. although Mathew swallows some of
his lines as a result of which I often could not make out what Sushant was
saying in his mother tongue. Of course a lot can be forgiven because he is
cute. Ironically, his Hindi diction is excellent, and comes as a package with a
delightful trace of a Malayalam accent. The precise way in which he says “contracts”
and pronounces “L” or the way she pronounces “D” are fun to hear because their
accents are not being caricatured.
There are a couple
of standout scenes such as the one in which Sarita and Sushant fight in bed
with their kid lying asleep between them and another involving the couple, a
kitchen drain and top-notch sound design by Gautam Nair. The construction of
both scenes is vintage Kashyap, as is the mischievous closing song.
What is not vintage
Kashyap is the lack of clarity and sharpness in what he seems to be saying
about demonetisation and achhe din.
And exactly what is
the point in showing us a lazy jerk of a husband who never does any work at
home, is inconsiderate to his wife but is somehow presented as a sweetheart, is
made to sound at one point as though he is willing to do anything for her but
oh how unfair is she, and in the end gets to save the day?
Kashyap’s last two breathtakingly
good films were Mukkabaaz
and Raman
Raghav 2.0. Choked wants
to say a lot, but is not even as hard-hitting or entertaining as his tweets.
Rating (out
of 5 stars): 2
Running time:
|
114 minutes
|
This review has also been published on Firstpost:
Poster
courtesy: IMDB
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