From the bucolic and tranquil forests of Jharkhand to a cacophonous and bustling urban jungle, the forced transition that Dasru Kerketta (Manoj Bajpayee) and his wife Vaano (Tannishtha Chatterjee in a special appearance) make in Joram, an immersive and disturbing man-on-the-run drama written and directed by Devashish Makhija, is excruciatingly and expectedly painful.
The man, fleeing a life that has become untenable, ends up in a refuge - a construction site in Mumbai where he and his wife are employed - that is worse than the physical and systemic violence that he wants to put behind him. No matter where Dasru goes, he is at the receiving end of antagonistic forces out to summarily eliminate him.
His anguish, emblematic of the agony of a diverse collective that routinely faces a similar fate in a country where development is designed to primarily benefit the wealthy and the powerful, spills over when the harried man is pushed into a corner and compelled to make a dash for freedom with his three-month-old daughter, Joram, a metaphor for everything that needs to be saved from rampant greed and hostility.
Having taken to his heels in alarming circumstances, a gravely imperilled Dasru makes his way back to the forest that he calls home but, here too, he finds himself deep in the woods. His past does not stop chasing him.
Dasru's fate is unrelentingly bleak and that is the tone that Joram, produced by Zee Studios, stays with all through even when stray absurdist moments - especially in the barely functional police station back in Dasru's village in Chandwa block of Jharkhand's Latehar district - inch close to the edges of dark humour.
The film opens with Dasru humming a lilting jhumoor folk song (of the tribal belt of Bengal and Jharkhand) celebrating the beauty and benison of Nature. A freeze-frame stops the song. The swing Vaano is on disappears from sight. Displacement and disruption are rarely conveyed with such striking economy of means.
Five years on, the couple lives and works in a dusty construction site. They are now parents of an infant girl, whose swing is not suspended from a tree. An old saree turns into a makeshift hammock in Vaano and Dasru's dark, cramped tin shack. This is life on the margins in what seems to be the heart of a city that provides the likes of Dasru no more than their basic needs.
Even that bare minimum is violently snatched away from Dasru and his daughter. As is often the case in a society that refuses to allow the voiceless a hearing, the victim is held culpable for the tragic turn of events. Dasru is branded a fugitive and chased by a small posse of overworked Mumbai police personnel led by Sub-Inspector Ratnakar Bagul (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub).
Joram forms a triptych of sorts with Makhija's previous two fiction features - Ajji (2017) and Bhonsle (2018). Besides being about faceless people who subsist on the fringes of a big city and encounter political and social oppression at many levels, the three films are bound together by the dispiriting spaces they play out in, the simmering violence that explodes in shocking ways and the theme of vengeance that underline theme.
But, in spirit, Joram is probably the closest to Oonga, a film that Makhija made a decade ago about an Adivasi boy whose life is disrupted by the civil unrest sparked by illegal mining and the forest dwellers' response to the threat of displacement. The film went largely unnoticed, so Makhija turned it into a YA novel centred on the human cost of unsustainable urban-centric development.
Dasru's fate in Joram isn't unlike the destiny of the eponymous tribal boy in Oonga although the violence that the former confronts is much, much more unsettling at the personal level. In all his earlier films, the protagonists were up against fiendish opponents, human and otherwise.
In Joram, in contrast, Makhija finds redeeming aspects in the individual agents of violence - tribal legislator Phulo Karma (Smita Tambe) and the sub-inspector sent to Jharkhand to nab Dasru and bring him back to Mumbai to face the law. The government official who informs the villagers that they have to give up their land for an upcoming iron ore mining project remains faceless, as does the steel company head who now calls the shots in the region.
Phulo has a reason for the hatred that she nurtures for Dasru. Her animosity is rooted in the past. On the other hand, the sub-inspector, as he engages with the world that Dasru and his ilk inhabit, realises that he has no reason to treat them like enemies.
The cops in Joram, be they in Mumbai or in the backwaters of Jharkhand, are as exploited by the system as the displaced forest dwellers are. They have little control over their actions. They merely carry out orders.
When we first see him, Ratnakar has been sleepless for 48 hours. He hasn't been home since he reported for duty two days ago. His wife Mukta (Rajshri Deshpande in a guest role and seen principally on the policeman's mobile phone screen) frets (but does not fume) about his well-being. Ratnakar's boss believes in no such niceties and orders him not to demand a break until Dasru has been brought to book.
We are in a world here where the lawman and the law-breaker, the pursuer and the pursued, are in the same boat and in the same choppy waters where survival hangs by a thread. The turmoil is captured brilliantly by cinematographer Piyush Puty, who lenses faces with the same piercing intimacy that he brings to bear upon the framing of the expanses of a denuded land shrieking for succour.
A stellar Manoj Bajpayee helps the unsettling film anchor itself to the ground even as it sends the audience reeling. He surrenders himself completely to Dasru Kerketta, combining the fury of the hapless and the misery of the helpless. The lead actor encases his rage in a hard, steely exterior that appears both unbreakable and brittle.
Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub and Smita Tambe - both have substantial roles what is essentially a Bajpayee show, representing the faces of the law and politics respectively - deliver first-rate performances that enhance the impact of the film.
Joram isn't meant to be entertaining but it is gripping from start to finish.
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Manoj Bajpayee, Mohd Zeeshan Ayyub and Tannishtha Chatterjee