Cast: Rajkummar Rao, Pankaj Tripathi, Anjali Patil, Raghubir Yadav
Director: Amit V Masurkar
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
I would love to see Pankaj Tripathi as a sleuth. Not only is the actor incapable of hitting a false note, but there is a beautiful inscrutability to his actions and to his eyes. We don't know if he's about to stifle a yawn or bark lethal orders, and this feeling that even the actor himself is deciding in the moment what exactly to do next, as if he is making up the words he's saying, marks Tripathi out as an extremely compelling performer. It's hard to look away, and, as I said, I'd love to see him in a role that fetishises his seemingly unpredictable thinking process.
This is a film about how impossible it is to follow the rules.
Newton Kumar, played by the assiduously chameleonic Rajkummar Rao, is a stickler for the written word. He might have changed his first name - he was originally named Nutan, like the Bandini actress - but he likes to play by the rules, so much so that as a youngster playing cricket he'd find himself in the role of umpire. He is close to being irritatingly earnest, and through the course of this film, every character, even those who like him, lose their patience with him.
The dialogues are indeed excellent. A father tries to tempt his son to marry an underage girl by telling him he'll live a life drenched in ghee - "zindagi bhar ghee mein dooba rahega," he says colourfully - and there is a lovely bit where the English word 'Joker' is dismantled and turned into the optimistic sounding Hindi 'Jo kar', which is used to say do as you may. Even when the lines aren't great or seem too literal, like when Aatma talks, ponderously, about the weight of a nation or when Newton, near the end of the film, feels the need to deliver a story-so-far plot synopsis (in case we haven't been paying attention), the actors are more than capable of lifting the words. Sanjay Mishra, for example, shows up to tell us the underlying problem with Newton- that he is arrogant about his honesty - as if he's known and taught him forever, instead of having just met the young man. What an actor, though.
The film begins, in fact, with a politician standing next to a cutout barely larger than himself, like a flattened twin, exhorting the masses not to vote for him - before going on to say that he wants the populace to have a laptop in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. Caveat emptor, India.
Rao and Tripathi provide terrific performances, especially when pouncing on one another - even literally. They are well complemented by Raghubir Yadav in an entertainingly loquacious role, Anjali Patil as a smartly dignified Adivasi woman and, quite memorably, Mukesh Prajapati as an election officer who doesn't have much to say but is easily, enviably content. The reason he chose this high-security posting was because he wanted to ride in a helicopter, and while the film is all about witnessing the dog of democracy being wagged, this is one character who gets what he wants. Fresh free-range eggs, a meal of country chicken, a chopper ride. He is, therefore, the least likely to go anywhere. All beware the well fed.
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