Film: Satyagraha
Starring: Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgn, Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Rampal
Director: Prakash Jha
Producer: Ronnie Screwvala, Prakash Jha, Siddharth Roy Kapur
Banner: UTV Motion Pictures
Music: Salim-Sulaiman
Prakash Jha's "Satyagraha"
bears no thematic relation to any of his earlier political dramas. It
is certainly not a sequel to his "Raajneeti", as has been reported in
some sections of the media. And yes, it is most certainly based on the
movement that Anna Hazare started against corruption. To say that Mr.
Bachchan's character Dwarka Anand in "Satyagraha", lovingly called
Dadujee by one and all, and Dadujee's turbulent relationship with the
go-getting NRI-turned-Gandhian-nationalist Maanav Raghvendra(Devgn) does
not bear a resemblance to the Anna Hazare-Arvind Kejriwal equation,
would be plain blindness.
What Jha and his very able astute and
politically informed co-writer and long-time collaborator Anjum Rajabali
have done, is to collect together the thematic threads of Anna Hazare's
mass anti-corruption movement and weave it into a gripping, thoughtful,
hard-hitting and inspirational drama which contains all the resonances
of a newspaper headline, and wrap it up in the semantics of cinema with
as little creative violence as possible even while addressing an
inherently violent issue.
From the time Jha made his intensely
political drama "Damul", there has been a constant strife between the
director's personal political ideology and its rendition into
cinematically interpreted language. Drama and emotions have always been
Jha's bete noire. In his predominantly brutal domain of interpersonal
politics, the human drama is played out austerely, often at the cost of
squandering away the chance to draw the characters' innerscape in an
elaborately-charted schem .
In Jha's "Aarakshan", we had seen that
trademark emotional austerity in the way he portrayed Mr. Bachchan's
relationship with his screen-daughter Deepika Padukone. In "Satyagraha",
one feels the relationship between Mr. Bachchan's character and his
widowed daughter-in-law (Amrita Rao) could have gone a little further.
But then Mr. Bachchan is the kind of extraordinary actor who can say so
much about his character's emotional environment in the most meagre
playing-time. Here, he has that one moment with Amrita Rao when hearing
her sob in the dead of the night, he goes into her room to console
her... And we know the kind of deep bonding this powerful patriarch
shares with his cruelly widowed Bahu.
There is little time for emotions in
Jha's world of politics and national awakening. Dwarka Anand gets just
one sequence to show how much he misses his son. It's the moment when he
returns to the scene of his son's death... The father's anguish here is
palpable, throbbing with unexpressed grief. And then before we can
wallow in the moment, Jha's editor Santosh Mandal mercilessly tears us
away from this poignant scene of a father's loss.
In my favourite sequence, Mr. Bachchan
shares a son-like camaraderie with Devgn's character telling him how he
would miss Devgn when he leaves the next day. It is a deeply
contemplative moment where Devgn reacts to Mr. Bachchan's supple
emotions with rare care and attention.
Hold on to these infrequent episodes of
emotional expression in this turbulent tale of awakening the nation's
conscience where there is no room for individual's self-indulgence. In
fact, Devgn's growing fondness for the TV journalist Yasmin
Ahmed(Kareena Kapoor, lighting up every frame) and the sudden burst of a
acutely romantic song seems to belong to some other time-zone.
You see, there's the business of the
country's future to be attended to. And who better at creating a cinema
of socio-political reform than Prakash Jha? The director constantly
wrenches away from his individuals' personal feelings to focus on the
broader picture.
Jha's narration gets busy with the
business of swooping down on huge crowds of anxious restless people
looking for a way out of the country's scam-frozen destiny. It's a world
built on the premise of socio-political reform that Mahatma Gandhi and
Jayaprakash Narain dreamt of and Anna Hazare attempted to bring to
fruition.
There's an abundance of references to
mobilisation of youth power through the Internet and mobile.
"Satyagraha" probes and questions the validity and motivation of any
mass movement that is born out of an inividual's genuine passion for
reform. The pitfalls of such a mass movement are brought into play with a
vingery mixture of broad drama and subtle humour.
It is no coincidence that the film's
arch-villain is a politiciam portrayed as a kind of evil clown. Manoj
Bajpayee plays the scummy 'scammy' brazely corrupt politician with
lipsmacking relish. His smirky villainous neta act works as a perfect
foil to Mr. Bachchan's controlled never overdone messianic act.
Devgn, in the all important role of the
ambitious entrepreneur who becomes a catalyst for social change, could
have taken his character much further down the road of
self-articulation. On the other hand, Arjun Rampal has limited scope as a
goonda-turned-self-appointed youth leader. He has great fun sinking his
teeth into the rustic accent and boorish body language.
While the three main actors play off
with each other with supple grandeur, some other supporting actors and
characters are played at much too broad a pitch to be effective. When a
corrupt policeman takes off his uniform to join the mass movement, you
feel the script is teetering dangerously towards over-idealism.
But the message must be, and is, loud
and clear. It is time for the nation to chase away damnation before it's
too late. Jha's film is a timely wakeup warning, a massive clarion call
for the conscience, brilliantly manifested in Prasoon Joshi's title
song which tells us enough is enough, and listen... getting Gandhian on
the cancerous community of corrupt politicians is a symptom of
cowardice.
"Satygraha" conveys the uncontrollable
anger and energy of a nation on the brink. For telling it like it is and
for creating a compelling film out of the raw material of present-day
corruption, the film deserves a standing ovation.