Film: John Day
Starring: Naseeruddin Shah,Randeep Honda,Vipin Sharma,Sharat Saxena
Director: Ahishor Solomon
Producer: Anjum Rizvi, Aatef A Khan and K Asif
Banner: Channel F Entertainment
Music: Kshitij Tarey and Strings
This is no place for the weak. This
world as we know it. And this film, as we discover with the thrill of
chancing upon an unexpected little gem.
Inspired from a Spanish film, is it? I
really don't give a fig where writer-director Ahishor Solomon got the
raw material for this gripping cat-and-mouse tale. Does the kitchen
where the food on the table originates really mean anything? What counts
is the quotient of curiosity and suspense simulated by the script. And
there, "John Day" ranks very high.
Not for a while have we seen a film so
steeped in despair, so swathed in anxiety, so audaciously draped in
despair and yet it engages our senses without miring the plot in
morbidity.
The story is not for the squeamish. The
two main characters are constantly haunted by their irrevocably tragic
parts. Naseeruddin Shah and Randeep Hooda, real-life guru and pupil,
play people who know no happiness. Incidents from their past continue to
shadow and chase their present. There is scarcely a moment in the plot
when John (Shah) and Gautam (Hooda) are happy except when they are with
their beloved 'Other'.
But then Shernaz Patel, who plays
Naseer's wife and the very beautiful foreigner Elena Kazan who plays
Randeep girl are troubled by their own ghosts. So where do we go for
comfort?
What price, solace?
"John Day" is a restless edgy drama of
the doomed and the damned. This not the first time Randeep has played a
fugitive shadowed by his own past.But this is certainly his most layered
character which he performs with the kind of gravelly gusto that allows
us to get only as close to the sullen character as he wants us. Towards
the end-game when the momentum gets frenzied beyond recuperation,
Randeep's character's softer side emerges.
He has a brilliantly written monologue with a comatose character where we get to know how much this brutal man loves his woman.
Yup, this man can die for money and for love. It's a dichotomous character torn between self-abnegation and vendetta.
In a way Randeep character plays a
mirror-image of Naseer's banker gone amok. This is not the first time
that India's most vaunted actor has played a wizened common man pushed
to a corner by the monstrous corruption in out socio-political system.
Remember Neeraj Pathak's "A Wednesday"?
Here In "John Day" the terror that Naseer's character battles is far
more personal, and hence in many ways, much more moving and compelling.
His greatness as an actor doesn't come in the way of letting the
character of the common man have his say in the most natural way
possible.
It is very difficult to speak out openly
about the characters and their motivations without giving away the
plot. "John Day" is the kind of clenched yarn that makes you forget that
yawning distance between cinema and the audience. You become one with
the character's battles, without getting judgemental over their actions.
Some of the things that the characters
do are unmistakably brutal. An innocent woman's head is shattered by a
hammer, a man's tongue is bitten off and another man's neck is also
bitten off. It's a cold brutal world with no comic relief, at least none
where you laugh out loud at the ironies of life.
"John Day" brings the indomitable
Naseeruddin and the intriguing Randeep for a taut cat-and-mouse chase
that stays a step ahead of the audience right till the shattering
end-game.
While the two principal actors get under
their characters' skins, other actors seem equally at home in this inky
kingdom of greed and gluttony. Vipin Sharma and Makrand Despande are
very engaging in their supporting parts. They make doom seem anything
but dull. But the film's third hero is Sandeep Chowta's background
score. It creates a world of emotions beyond the spoken words for Naseer
and Randeep.
This is a world where there is no escape
from sorrow and grief. Enemies are clobbered and butchered mercilessly.
Not because they deserve to die. But because life is as randomly brutal
as we make it for ourselves. And cinema such as this reminds us that
moral values of good, evil, justice and comeuppance mean nothing to
those who have nothing to lose.