A girl - she just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time - is dragged out of an Agra-bound bus by a band of Chambal brigands and taken captive. She is in an unconscious state and at the mercy of the predators. Help is miles away. In the lawless ravines, the police are conspicuous by their absence.
This, however, isn't where Nikhil Nagesh Bhatt's Apurva, streaming on Disney+Hotstar begins. The first thing that the impressively spry and uncompromisingly spare film does is establish the stark barrenness of the landscape, a dry and dusty region that has no hiding places for a traumatised doe pursued by a pack of hounds.
On a road that runs through this unpoliced expanse where only stunted shrubs and wild cactuses grow, the dacoits waylay a car loaded with expensive wedding ornaments. Nobody charged with ensuring that the jewels reach Jhansi survives the attack.
Neither do the driver and conductor of a passenger bus who run afoul of the oldest member of the gang, Jugnu (Rajpal Yadav), who is at the wheel of a stolen car and honks away relentlessly, demanding the right to overtake the bigger vehicle.
His passage having been blocked by a bus driver oblivious of the danger he is courting, Jugnu decides to prove who owns the road. His might flows from his Mauser and he will brook no obstacles in his way. It is as clear as daylight that his two quarries have nowhere to run when he takes aim.
Jugnu's men, Sukha (Abhishek Banerjee), Balli (Sumit Gulati) and Chhota (Aaditya Gupta), board the bus and, on an impulse, zero in on Apurva (Tara Sutaria in the kind of deglamorized role that she has never attempted before). She is on her way to Agra to spring a surprise on her fiance; Siddharth (Dhairya Karwa) on his birthday.
Apurva receives a mobile call from Sid. The dacoits' attention is attracted. They kidnap her. A harrowing day stretches deep into the night as the girl, confined to the dacoits' hideout, which really isn't much of a hideout because it is only an abandoned, stripped-down goods train coach that doubles up as one, struggles to ward off the grave danger that she faces from her captors.
The murderous outlaws look and sound ordinary, but the work that they do and the lawless region in which they operate with impunity are a part of Hindi cinema folklore. Apurva isn't a dacoit movie of the kind that Mumbai produced in the 1960s and 1970s but it does hark back to an era gone by while narrating a story located in our times.
The references in Apurva are to more recent Hindi films. When Jugnu is busy delivering the wedding jewelry loot to the man who tipped them off, Sukha watches a movie with his mates. He describes an actress on the screen as gharelu (homely), as someone he would like to wed.
Cut to a DDLJ figurine that Sukha gives a little flick. It ends up on the dashboard of Jugnu's car and a romantic song from an SRK movie plays on the audio system. There is, of course, nary a whiff of romance in the air in this part of the world.
The dissonance is further driven home by the next song that emanates from the car music system - Main nikla oh gaddi leke, oh raaste par oh sadak mein ek mod aaya. The road is a straight line without any bends but danger lurks on every stretch and in the abandoned villages that dot the region.
The writer-director, who was in the news recently for his Toronto Midnight Madness hit Kill, demonstrates an ability to pare the material down to its essentials and eschew any manner of excess. His consciously attenuated style reflects the unsettling sparseness of the site.
To be sure, Bhat's script fleshes out a female protagonist who is unexceptional. She not only settles for an arranged matrimonial match - in a bit of a twist, it is she and her family who travel from Gwalior to Agra to see her suitor and assess his suitability - she also makes it clear that she isn't interested in sex before marriage.
She is an old-fashioned romantic at heart and as routine in her thinking as one can be until a crisis erupts and she is left with no option but to fight back like a wounded tigress.
There is a lot of blood in Apurva all right but none of it, barring a patch on the inside of a car window, is actually seen. All the physical violence - it is perpetrated first by the dacoits and then by their hapless captive - takes place off screen.
Someone is bludgeoned to death with the butt of a pistol. Another man is killed with repeated blows of a rusted metal bucket. Yet another has his head smashed in with a boulder. Not only is the points of impact not captured by the camera, the splatter of blood is also only left to the imagination of the audience.
In terms of style, there is much in Apurva that is admirable. And the film's substance - a cornered girl wages a single-handed battle to save herself from bodily harm until her fiance; can find her - generates moments of palpable tension and suspense.
Where the film falls short is in the lack of meat around its bone structure. Its sinews are meagre and weak. A little more crackle might have livened up the film considerably.
The four desperadoes who, notwithstanding Rajpal Yadav and Abhishek Banerjee doing their very best to boost the evil effect of their coldblooded ways, aren't the kind of terrifying men that they are meant to be. They evoke disdain but not much dread. They represent more nuisance than menace.
For Tara Sutaria, who debuted four years ago in Dharma Productions' Student of the Year 2, Apurva is the first direct-to-streaming film. It gives her the chance to put Tadap and Heropanti 2 behind her and try something outside her comfort zone. She tries. Wish we could say more about the effort.
Apurva is an out-and-out female-centric film. The lover boy, played unobtrusively by Dhairya Karwa, sets out to rescue his would-be wife from the bandits without having the foggiest notion about her whereabouts. Unsurprisingly, he reaches the spot, like the police once would in Bollywood potboilers, when it is all over bar the shouting.
Apurva taps its potential only partly but that is just about enough to make the film passably watchable.
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Tara Sutaria, Abhishek Banerjee, Rajpal Yadav, Dhairya Karwa
