The review below may contain some spoilers…
There’s a quiet, rhythmic efficiency with which Suresh Triveni approaches his masala movie about a former soldier (Arjun Maurya, played by Anil Kapoor) who finds himself in opposition with the sand mafia. Subedaar opens with an image of men in a tractor, and the payoff arrives much later – and without much fanfare. We get chapter titles, but they are sometimes as basic as “Saalgirah”: a daughter wishes her father a happy anniversary, and the small twist is that the mother is dead. (Radhika Madan plays Arjun’s spirited daughter, Shyama. Khushbu Sundar plays the wife in a lovely cameo.) When Arjun is in a car with a friend, and the friend begins to talk about the dead wife, he presses the horn hard. The camera switches to his viewpoint of the road ahead, which is empty. So the sound was basically a signal to the friend to shut up. If Clint Eastwood played The Man With No Name, Anil Kapoor plays A Man of Few Words. He can face the most dangerous enemies, but he hesitates to tell his wife he loves her.
Subedaar looks and feels like a desi Western. The dusty Hindi heartland (beautifully shot by Ajay Saxena) stands in for the Frontier. It is a lawless region, of course, and there’s no Sheriff / police. This is not the Salim-Javed mode of masala. This is the masala movie we know from Tamil and Telugu cinema, and the director wants to class it up. The best masala touch is when the screen turns black and the title appears. It’s the point Arjun turns. For the longest time, Arjun doesn’t do anything. He imagines bashing someone’s face into the steering wheel of a car, but he doesn’t actually do it. He imagines twisting a government servant’s hand, but he doesn’t actually do it. But when Prince (Aditya Rawal) and his men do something to his car (there’s an emotional story behind it), that’s when he snaps. As always Anil Kapoor gives his one hundred and fifty percent, so when the character snaps, he really snaps.
Occasionally, a softer side to the man emerges, and Anil is wonderful here, too – when he finally utters the words his wife wanted to hear (but only when he’s all alone), or when he looks at a slain comrade. Subedaar rides on Anil Kapoor’s convincing performance and Suresh Triveni’s assured, atmospheric direction. There are two conflicts that play out in parallel. One is between Arjun and the brother-sister duo (Prince and Bali, played by Mona Singh) that heads the local sand mafia. It’s a nice touch that the veteran Subedaar Arjun Maurya is up against a man young enough to be his daughter’s boyfriend. As Denzel Washington has shown us in the crackling Equalizer movies, the older the better. The other conflict is between Shyama and the boy from her college who keeps sending her pornographic videos. If the father is fighting those who are raping Mother Earth, the daughter is standing up to men who sexualise women.
I enjoyed the leisurely (Western-ly?) pace of the film, even if the essential stunt work is average. (This is a fact we have learnt to live with in most Indian movies.) But where Subedaar misses its target is in the writing. There isn’t an emotional connection you can root for. The father-daughter angle is not written convincingly, and when she rebels, you see the desperation of a man who finds it difficult to get emotional – but we can’t be unemotional, too. At some point, we need to feel what’s happening. The brother-sister angle of the villains is simplistic, too. The inevitable death of these characters doesn’t feel cathartic – either in terms of a single man’s revenge, or in terms of the oppressive menace that has been haunting a village. Most Westerns / masala movies have predictable story arcs, and all we want is some unpredictability in the telling. That’s there in the treatment, for sure, but not in the script. If the writing had been up to the filmmaking, Subedaar would have been quite something.
