Shylock in The Merchant of Venice had his own way of taking revenge so how would you retaliate if a person wronged you, the drama teacher Murali (Kunal Kapoor) at an upper crust boarding school asks his student-actors. Will it be eye for an eye or will you forgive entirely? His impromptu query turns prophetic eventually. What transpires for real, in the school campus, is a shocking, unanticipated, insidious and brutal payback.
Curiously old worldly, the school is far from the cultured and disciplined space it aims to be. It’s a cruel, barbaric though often cliched representation of bullying and homophobia. Anyone not falling in line with the accepted codes is sure to find others riding roughshod on her/him — be it Pia, the only girl in the all boys’ school, or the fat Ganzu who sings out aloud or the soft and sensitive Shay who prefers sissy theatre to the manly sports. It’s about not being able to belong and fall in and the humiliations and mental and physical violence that follow thereafter.
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- Director: Vandana Kataria
- Starring: Kunal Kapoor, Ali Haji, Muskaan Jaaferi, Ivan Rodrigues, Hardik Thakkar, Soni Razdan, MK Raina, Mohammad Ali Mir
- Run time: 121 minutes
- Storyline: The horrors of bullying and homophobia play out in a posh boarding school in the hills even as the students rehearse for staging The Merchant of Venice for the Founders’ Day
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It’s also about sexual awakening and the confusions that come in its wake as the masters try hard to train young students to become men by force of law. Why are schools unable to tackle issues of homosexuality and homophobia? The question is raised but not quite answered.
The troublemakers thrive on even as the meek keep quiet to survive and toxicity hits the roof. Violence soon spins out of control and goes to the extremes. Vandana Kataria tells it straight but keeps making one wonder why things could never be called to a stop much earlier. Why couldn’t the “cruel devil” be emphatically “curbed of his will”? The grisly violations get too much to stomach as the thin line between the sensitive and the sensational keeps getting blurred. All’s not so well as things come to a closure on a rather sinister note, a sudden twist that is never convincingly explained.
An experienced actor like Kapoor and veterans like Raina and Razdan have little to do. It’s the children, specially Ali Haji as Shay, who turn in seasoned performances in what must be an early outing for them at the movies; with complex role-playing at that. Haji is specially good with conveying Shay’s physical vulnerability that is accompanied with an edginess and mental cussedness and many untamed monsters deep within.
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