REVIEW 388: TRAFFIC

Release date:	May 6, 2016
Director:	Rajesh Pillai
Cast: Language:	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):	UA
Running time:	104 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/traffic-review-needless-messaging-spoils-this-manoj-bajpayee-starrer-2768456.html

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_(2016_film)

  

REVIEW 136: SHANGHAI

Release date:	June 8, 2012
Director:	Dibakar Banerjee
Cast:	Abhay Deol, Emraan Hashmi, Pitobash Tripathy, Prosenjit Chatterjee, Kalki Koechlin, Farooque Shaikh, Supriya Pathak Kapur, Tillotama Shome

The best thing about Shanghai is that it’s not trying desperately hard to be ‘edgy’. In recent years, that word has gradually come to signify (for me, at least) pretentious Hindi cinema pretending and/or trying to look…European, North American, South American…anything but Indian! The irony here is that Dibakar Banerjee’s film is based on the novel Z by Greek writer Vassilis Vassilikos which was made into the award-winning film by Costa Gavras. Yet, Shanghai feels completely Indian.

This is a story of the wheels within wheels that pervade the Indian system, where everyone is flawed yet most are not without redeeming qualities either; where the charismatic politician on that hoarding could be the devil incarnate whose leadership skills still cannot be dismissed outright; where the charismatic activist on the street could be a womaniser whose cause and commitment are worth supporting all the same; where the sleazy part-time pornographer could be a bravely loyal fellow who would risk his life for a man he considered his brother; and where the solution may not be perfectly satisfactory, but it still exists and gives you a whisper of hope.

Shanghai is set in an India where the ruling political party in a state has staked everything on an International Business Park and the Shanghai-ification of that state. Into this picture enters academic-and-activist Dr Ahmedi who is fighting for the poor displaced by that ‘development’. When a murder takes place to stem the movement, the authorities are determined to prove that it was an accident, but fail to account for that one honest IAS officer whose fact-finding mission threatens to dig too deep for comfort. The writing by Banerjee and Urmi Juvekar, the casting, the cast, the production design by Vandana Kataria, cinematography by Nikos Andritsakis all conspire to make this a disturbing political thriller where connections and contacts run much further than you could imagine.

Director Dibakar Banerjee’s strength is that he tells it like it is, with no apologies and no frills attached. That’s what he did in his earlier films Khosla ka Ghosla, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and Love Sex aur Dhoka. That’s what he does here too, even though in Shanghai he moves away from the familiar setting of Delhi to a fictional small town/city. His other strength is the ability to inject humour into the most gruesome situations without being offensive. Shanghai is both funny and frightening. In spite of the unrelentingly grim goings-on, the satirical asides made me laugh intermittently … but with a sense of almost-guilt at my own laughter.

There’s some nice detailing in Shanghai. Like the name card on a table reserved for a government official that misspells his initials; the newly swabbed floor in a government office where, of course, a “slippery floor” warning sign is not mandatory; the brief use of poor English that’s not overdone and shows no condescension towards the speaker (a woman is asked about her connection to “the accidented man”) ... The songs are unmemorable yet somehow fit in with the mood of the film. There is only one truly jarring point in the film when it betrays a determination to be pro-poor/uneducated and anti-rich/educated as far as possible, whatever be the cost: the tone of justification is a bit much when a murderer who happens to be a poor man, seemingly equates his actions with that of an activist who thrashes him for having killed someone.

The pick of the cast here is Emraan Hashmi who has made a career so far out of playing the loveable – often scruffy – romantic scamp and being known as Bollywood’s ‘serial kisser’. Despite the repetitiveness, he’s done a fair job in most of his films, but Shanghai will hopefully be a turning point. His shady cameraman-and-porn-shooter Joginder here is not just his best role so far, it’s also his best performance. To see him sitting on a floor playing out an incriminating audio/video clip to an investigating officer, then turning to that man with eyes beseeching him for affirmation that this evidence is sufficient, is to truly witness desperation. I don’t understand why Banerjee didn’t simply cast a south Indian actor as the south Indian (Tamilian?) official Krishnan, but having chosen that route, he seems to have picked the best man for the job. Abhay Deol is effective as the unsmiling bureaucrat who does the accent with the effort barely showing through and thankfully without turning himself into the typical Bollywood ‘Madrasi’ caricature. Pitobash as the low-life murderer with a heart is an absolute live wire. The rest of the cast too acquit themselves extremely well … Prosenjit Chatterjee (as Dr Ahmedi), Farooque Shaikh (as Krishnan’s boss), Supriya Pathak Kapur (in a small but impactful appearance as the chief minister) and the achingly good Aanat Jouge (that’s how the film’s official website spells Anant Jog’s name) as the driver of the vehicle in the ‘accident’ ... The exception is Kalki Koechlin playing Ahmedi’s student Shalini with an unvarying tone pretty much from start to finish.

With so much to praise, I still can’t say this film has shaken me to the core with the weaving together of its many lovely elements. One big reason is that Shalini – who connects the worlds of Joginder, Krishnan and Ahmedi – remains a distant creature who is hard to relate to, unlike the other characters who are all better written and better acted. There is also the fact that the early part of Shanghai demands some patience … this is not one of those films that sucks you in right from the first scene. It takes its time to draw you in. When it does though, the sadness is inescapable. Really very nice, Mr Banerjee.

Rating (out of five): ***1/2

CBFC Rating:                       U/A

Language:                              Hindi

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_(2011_film)