Cinemaah

Dilli Dilli


Rajkumar Gupta’s well-made debut Aamir was somewhat tarnished by the exposure of its foreign source (Cavite). His second is as Indian—rather as Dilli—as India Gate.

That a film like No One Killed Jessica (taken from a newspaper headline) was made at all is a wonder. The sensational case has all but slipped from public memory, though the incident itself—of a politician’s son shooting a girl in cold blood and almost getting away with it—has been used in other films (Satta, Halla Bol) for its shock value. Then, it has two female protagonists, and Bollywood is notoriously wary of woman in the lead.

Gupta has taken most of the facts of the case and partially fictionlized the story—keeping the names of Jessica and Sabrina Lall, but changing all the others. This is quite puzzling, since everything about the case is in the public domain. 

The narrator is a journalist Meera (Rani Mukherji) obviously inspired by Barkha Dutt (who did not, actually run the sting that blew the case open), who has been covering Kargil and Khandahar and finds a murder “low profile,” till the killer gets away and her righteous anger maker her take it up when the dead girl’s (Myra) sister Sabrina (Vidya Balan) has given up in despair.

Gupta treats the film with documentary-like realism, but fails somewhere to connect beyond evoking the same outrage as the actual murder had in the minds of the people. However, the case was not a “milestone in Indian history” as Meera says.  It was high profile enough to get the usually apathetic middle-class to wake up and protest, and the media to do its job as a social watchdog; but if one considers that nothing substantial in terms of legal or procedural reforms came of it, Gupta’s noncommittal stance is even more jarring.  If it was to ‘inspire’ then for a short while, even Rang De Basanti (homage paid to it here) supposedly woke up the youth.  It is the high society element that is provocative, that’s why this, and not another of the many cases of miscarriage of justice, is picked up to film.

Incredibly superficial is Gupta’s portrayal of class—the upper class Bina Ramani- inspired character Mallika as an phoney drama queen, and the killer, named Manish Bharadwaj here, as a hick with a Haryanvi accent. The journalist is a foul-mouthed smoker, drinker and ‘one-night-stand–er’. Sabrina is a bespectacled, unglamorous, woman, with supposedly no life of her own. Even her sister taunts her for being a ‘behenji’. Why such heavy use of stereotypes?

As a thriller, the film has its highs—the sting on the cowardly actor who witnessed the murder but was bribed into silence; or the incriminating tape quietly left in Meera’s post box by the cop (Rajesh Sharma) who is corrupt but also on the side of justice.

In the end, despite its cinematic excellence, the film remains a mixed bag because it shies away from pushing the envelope further.  It’s a good, watchable film that could have been a masterpiece of social signposting, that in Indian cinema is so rare.

The performances by the two lead actresses are extraordinary… both playing against type with confidence.  Vidya Balan shedding glamour to play a plain fighter; Rani shedding her Bolly heroine coyness to play the ferocious journalist. The film belongs to them, as much as to the director, his technical team and his music composer.  Watch, but also debate.