Sunday, March 03, 2019
Sonchiriya
Call Of The
Ravines
Abhishek
Chaubey, who has mapped the Indian hinterland in his earlier films, goes to the
Chambal ravines, that once featured in dozens of films with horse-riding
dacoits. In Sonchiriya, a character
laughs at the stereotype, who ever heard of bandits on horseback. The baagis (outlaws) in the film can drive
cars (how and where did they learn?) and unlike the Gabbar Singhs of Bollywood,
are a tired bunch who have come to believe that prison might be better that
this life on the run, constantly looking over their shoulders for bullets that
could come from the gun of a cop or a rival gang.
The film is
set in the mid-seventies, when Emergency was just declared. Daaku Man Singh
(Manoj Bajpayee) and his deputies, Lakhna (Sushant Singh Rajput) and Vakila
(Ranvir Shorey) are recovering from a trauma (which is revealed later), that
haunts them and makes them question the “baaghi’s dharma.”
In this film
the bandits may loot and kill without any twinge of conscience, but they have a
code of honour that dictates that they do not touch the bride whose wedding
party they have hit; Man Singh even
makes Vakil gift some money to the wailing bride. Chaubey wants to portray
these men as noble, but without any back story, it is tough to sympathise with
them, and see the pursuing policeman Virendra Singh Gujjar (Ashutosh Rana) as a
villain.
Their
numbers decimated by the cops (no tears for the men in uniform doing their
jobs?) the gang is on the run with inadequate weapons, but Lakhna still insists
on talking along Indumati (Bhumi Pednekar—small but effectively played part),
who is trying to take a brutalized young girl to the hospital. She has also
killed her father-in-law who raped the child, for which her own young son wants
to shoot her dead. In the caste hierarchy, she says, women are the lowest of
the low.
Chaubey has,
with the help of the cinematographer (Anuj Rakesh Dhawan), captured a bleak but stunningly beautiful
landscape, wrecked by the violence unleashed by toxic machismo, caste and class
divides and a disturbing contempt for women, that gave birth to Phoolan – or
Phuliya, she appears later in the film, a woman of courage and compassion.
For all its
merits, this story of revenge and redemption has been done before, and without
the addition of a folkloric element (that the best Hollywood Westerns manage), Sonchiriya looks dated; it is made
somewhat watchable by the strength of its performances—Manoj Bajpayee is
brilliant as usual, but the transformation of Rajput and Shorey, and the
conviction with which they play their roles is remarkable.
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