Saturday, July 23, 2016
Madaari
Uncommon Man
Our roads
are potholed, flyovers and buildings topple over regularly, illegal buildings
proliferate, there is corruption everywhere, and political movements against it
have not yet succeeded; so the elementary vigilantism of Madaari is naïve and pointless; it’s not as if Nishikant Kamat is
exposing something hidden or shocking.
Still, if
the story had substance, the film might have been as effective, as, say, A Wednesday, which was also about the
rage of the common man. Taking the core from that film and the road movie style
of A Perfect World, Kamat comes up
with a weak rant against venal politicians.
Nirmal Kumar
(Irrfan Khan) loses his son in a bridge collapse and his world shatters. With
his compensation cheque (in real life, he wouldn’t have got it without greasing
some palms) he plans the kidnapping of the home minister’s (Tushar Dalvi) son,
Rohan (Vishesh Bansal.)
All stops
are pulled out for the investigations, led by the stony-faced Nachiket (Jimmy
Sheirgill), but as Nirmal taunts them, he is hard to trace because he looks so
common.
Rohan starts
out by being a brat, but turns surprisingly docile and pliant, as he is made to
change costumes and dragged all over North India by the kidnapper. He has any number of chances to escape, but
the kid explains his own feelings towards Nirmal as Stockholm Syndrome, and
also sympathy for the man’s dead child.
Turns out,
all Nirmal wants is a public admission of corruption by the people responsible
for the bridge collapse, right from the engineers to politicians, including
Rohan’s father, who has a monologue about the greed of the powerful, which
could not be more hackneyed, and Nirmal’s response about the gullibility of the
masses could not be more immature.
The film is
well-intentioned and has some powerful scenes and a few pithy lines, plus an
outstanding performance by Irrfan Khan, but as a ‘voice of the common citizen’
it does not quite work. The anti-politician vigilante does even see the irony
in the huge outlay of public funds spent to track him.
Labels: Cinemaah
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