Madaari: Sshhh Desh So Raha Hai (Hindi)
Director: Nishikant Kamath
Starring: Irrfan Khan, Jimmy Sheirgill, Vishesh Bansal
Madaari begins with Irrfan Khan’s voiceover sonorously telling us a story about the struggle between a baaz (a hawk) and a chooza (chick). It sounds real, he says, but not as good – if in the end, the hawk tramples over the chick. However, the same story would feel good but unreal with a different end, one in which the chick gets the better of the hawk.
Nishikant Kamat’s Madaari is a familiar tale of the fight of a chick, aka common man, against the hawk, or the corrupt system – politicians, bureaucrats, administration et al – that is seen as the cause for every problem facing the nation, be it inflation, unemployment or water crisis. It is, yet another one of the new-age vigilante genre of films that articulates the frustration and cynicism deep-seated in the middle-class Indian psyche.
The resemblance to A Wednesday is unmistakable. There, the common man, played by Naseeruddin Shah, plants bombs to fight terrorists.
Here, Khan kidnaps the Home Minister’s son to avenge his own son’s death and to get the better of politicians. In both films, the narrative is all about how the cops (Anupam Kher there, Jimmy Sheirgill here) eventually nab the man but not before he has addressed the nation, spoken his mind, all in an effort to try and wake the sleeping citizens up.
Madaari is loud and frenzied and doesn’t get persuasive, provocative or rousing. Perhaps a fresh, untold perspective would have helped rather than an obvious one. The preachy tone doesn’t help either, be it the talk about a government that exists only for corruption or the citizenry torn apart by the caste-class divides.
All this drama plays out in the midst of a sensation-seeking media circus, a worn out leitmotif now in film after film.
The film refuses to fly despite the ever reliable Irrfan Khan as its backbone. A pity when you see him put his heart and soul into the role of Nirmal Kumar. It’s just the force of Khan’s performance that takes you along from one scene to the next. Whether it is how he tackles the precocious child Rohan (Vishesh Bansal) he has kidnapped, for whom he becomes a surrogate father of sorts and vice versa. Or, in how he articulates the depth of his pain at the unfathomable loss of his own son in a civic tragedy.
NAMRATA JOSHI
