The drama portion of ‘Jigra’ has no tension, and the thriller part of the film lacks excitement. The movie moves with mechanical efficiency, and very little feels inspired. The rest of this review may contain spoilers…
Vasan Bala’s first big film was Mard Ko Dard Nahin Hota, and it was an affectionate, beautifully made homage to our movies and our movie memories. It was a superhero saga styled through the gaze of the Hindi-cinema potboiler. The film channelled an older era of moviemaking and made it palatable to a hip multiplex audience. A similar, playful vibe was found in Vasan’s second film. This time, a retro-noir flavour was styled through the gaze of the Hindi-cinema potboiler. The very title, Monica, O My Darling, came from older Hindi cinema. Many filmmakers want to make the audience have a lot of fun. Vasan wants that, sure – but he also wants to have a lot of fun himself while making his movies, especially while writing them. If the Radhika Madan character from Mard Ko Dard made an appearance in Monica, the line “Do I look sad?” from Monica makes an appearance in Vasan’s new film, Jigra.
The person asking this question is Satya, played by Alia Bhatt. She is an Indian in a fictional far-eastern country, and her mission is to save her kid brother Ankur, played by Vedang Raina. (He is not asked to do much, and that much he does well.) The plot is a gender-reversal of Mahesh Bhatt’s Gumraah, where the heroine was imprisoned in a far-eastern country for possessing drugs and is saved by the hero. It is always fun to see how Alia will decide to do a role. Here, she plays Satya like a robot. The only time an emotional side emerges is when she’s with Ankur, and much later, when she befriends another Indian in this strange country. (As this fellow-Indian, Manoj Pahwa makes another strong case that he should be cast in just about every possible Hindi movie.) There’s a scene in prison where Satya is gasping for breath, and she tells a guard: “Ankur is my brother’s name.” Alia works this shortness of breath into that line reading in an utterly natural way that proves that she’s probably incapable of giving a soulless or boring performance.
For the most part, Vasan does away with character building and motivation and such things that are traditionally considered important in a narrative. Everything is already there. In other words, we enter a world where the characters are already this way. There are no transformative “arcs” in store. Take the question: Why and how is Satya such a badass? Her physical strength is explained away by a line where she says she learnt karate, and that she never played by the rules. Her mental strength, her maturity beyond her years, is implied in a fantastic early scene where a young Satya watches someone dying, and her instant reaction is to cover her brother’s eyes. So while the brother retains his playfulness and pampered innocence, Satya has turned into stone – or a samurai warrior. Supervising the arrangements at a wedding from the top of the stairs, she notes that a lamp on the floor below needs oil. Her focus on the task at hand is that sharp. Looking at the way the shot is set up, Satya comes off like Alfred Hitchcock’s camera in the “key scene” in Notorious.
Having received no love herself, Satya lavishes all her emotions on her brother. She has no personal life apart from this sibling bond, and apart from a rendition of Phoolon ka taaron ka, even this bond isn’t sentimentalised or milked for emotion. Broadly speaking, Vasan has made a movie as brutal and as single-minded as Satya. When a character says “he is like my brother,” and when he later betrays this brother, the betrayal is kept off-screen. There is no melodramatic attempt to build this betrayal into more of a betrayal than it already is. When an office building is burnt down, we don’t get a visual of towering flames. Again, the event is kept off-screen. We just get the line, “Office mein aag lag gayi,” and we smile because we know why. We get a long fight sequence with just silence in the soundtrack, and the score kicks in only when Satya screams, “Mera bhai nahin mar sakta.” The score knows Satya well.
Clearly, a lot of love, a lot of thought has gone into Jigra – but the film is defeated by two things. One, the basic material is kitsch – and all these touches keep trying to class up a story that cannot be classed up. All these touches are more appropriate for a drama, and indeed, a lot of Jigra seems confused whether it wants to be a drama or a pulpy prison-break thriller, the kind where someone says “That jail is impenetrable” and we laugh because we know there’s no such thing as an impenetrable jail in a jailbreak movie. The film, finally, falls in a no man’s land. At least the drama portions work as individual bits, here and there. But the thriller bits are completely generic, and the plotting seems to have been made up as they went along. The drama portion of Jigra has no tension, and the thriller part of the film lacks excitement. The movie moves with mechanical efficiency, and very little feels inspired.
The second problem is due to the playful film references, beginning with Satya being labelled a Bachchan-style heroine. My favourite cine-geek touch came when “Jhuki jhuki si nazar” played at one point; it comes from a film directed by the father of this film’s heroine. There’s a fantastic subversion of the old trope where an Indian in a foreign land turns out to become a friend and protector. Here, the character deliciously played by Vivek Gomber, becomes a vicious enemy. But his viciousness is deflated by his too-clever name: Hansraj Landa, a play on the villain’s name from Inglourious Basterds. The minute we hear of a prisoner named Kim Ki-Duk, the sense of no one being serious settles in. When the Tamil character played by Rahul Ravindran is named Muthu, another Rajinikanth name in the Vasan-verse after Surya in Mard Ko Dard, the man becomes a bit of a pop-culture game.
The Bachchan films knew what they were up to. They knew their audience. They knew their tonality. They stuck to that OTT zone. From the stunts to the emotions to the dialogues, everything was over-the-top. In Jigra, the classy serious bits cancel out the playful elements and the pulp twists make it hard to care about the drama. When Pran’s famous song from Zanjeer plays over a death scene, it’s hard to know what to feel. In a Bachchan film, we would have teared up instantly. Here, the song doesn’t seep into the scene. It stays at a self-aware distance, like retro-cool wallpaper. Perhaps the two-and-a-half hour Jigra would have made more sense as a shorter film. I love the fact that Satya finally cuts loose and weeps loudly at the end, as though this entire journey was some sort of therapy. But like the rest of the film, this is just one of the parts that works. As a whole, it just doesn’t come together.
