Adivi Sesh and Mrunal Thakur play dysfunctional lovers. When the film opens, he is in prison and she has gotten on with her life. When he breaks out and contacts her again, a strange twist of fate makes them team up as robbers. The central relationship needed better detailing. But overall, this is a very well-written movie that makes you wait for the payoffs, which are deeply satisfying. That’s the short take. A longer review follows, and it may contain spoilers.
Dacoit is written by Adivi Sesh and Abburi Ravi. I don’t know what sparked their imagination, but this story about a couple that goes around robbing hospitals (with one of them being a poor driver) reminded me of Arthur Penn’s era-defining Bonnie and Clyde. What if Bonnie and Clyde had had relationship issues? What if one of them betrayed the other? In other words, what if you “Indianised” that film with a larger-than-life sensibility, but also with micro-detailed Hollywood-style writing where a man sees his ex with a little girl and has a flashback to a time where she wanted a little boy and… end of this little moment. It’s just a slice of memory, and it is allowed to stay a slice of memory. It is not expanded into a scene where – for instance – he says “Remember you wanted a boy” and she says “Yeah, life doesn’t always give you what you want” and the violins in the background play over our heads, demanding us to feel this sentiment.
Despite all the action and romance and drama and that title that promises thrills, there’s a wonderfully muted quality to Dacoit, which is beautifully directed by Shaneil Deo. Adivi Sesh and Mrunal Thakur play Hari and Saraswati. They were in love. Then something happened, and he ended up in prison. As the film opens, over a decade has passed since Hari and Saraswati were together, but even while he’s doing pushups in his jail cell, he keeps recalling moments from happier times. But Hari is not your typical lover, yearning to return to Saraswati’s arms. He is a man obsessed. He wants revenge. The screenplay and the editing by Kodati Pavan Kalyan keep going back and forth in time, and the film finds a fabulous rhythm that fits a story where the past and the present are always interconnected. The plot gets going when Hari escapes and decides to go on a robbing spree with Saraswati. Prakash Raj plays a corrupt hospital tycoon, and Anurag Kashyap (who’s fantastic) joins in as an honest cop headed to Sabarimala.
What follows is a solid action drama where the action appears to have been “written” as much as the drama. In an exciting set piece inside an elevator, the doors keep opening and closing, and during one such instance, when the doors open, Hari sees something that devastates him. In another terrific set piece in a marketplace, a loudspeaker brings a key character into the Hari-Saraswati universe. Even the COVID-time setting is used well, with the masks becoming a mirror of the masks used by our dacoits. And despite the guns and the bloodshed and the chases, there’s always a human touch, something smaller and more intimate. During one action scene, Hari is torn between his mission and his desire for revenge. During another set piece, someone learns to drive a car just enough to get them out of a tight spot. They don’t become an F1 driver overnight. During yet another escapade, a getaway car hits a wall, the money spills onto a wet floor. This is not cool and slick James Bond-style action. The physical violence is a continuation of the emotional violence in the story.
Adivi Sesh and Mrunal Thakur give good performances in a higher register than usual, befitting the melodrama and the mass-y flavour. Bheems Ceciroleo contributes a soundtrack that is in sync with both the basic beats and the places where the film goes a little offbeat. There’s a scene where Hari speaks to a little girl. The music builds and builds. First, there’s just ambient sound, then we get an acoustic guitar, and then we get some percussion, and these final beats amplify and spill over into the next scene that has Saraswati in a dangerous situation. Dacoit could have worked just as well as a smaller, tighter, more intimate drama – but the bigness of scale, here, proves that it is possible to write sensibly and sensitively even for a movie that finds place for an item song starring Jonita Gandhi and Pawan Singh, the “Power Star” of the Bhojpuri film industry. Saraswati’s story, for instance, is narrated by two different people to two different sets of listeners. The screenplay is always two steps ahead of us. Even if we know Saraswati had a reason for doing what she did, the exact details come as a surprise.
There are two issues. The track between the characters played by Anurag Kashyap and Prakash Raj is not fleshed out satisfactorily – maybe there just wasn’t enough time. But the bigger problem, the main problem, is that the romance between Hari and Saraswati begins before the film did, in the sense that we open with a couple already in love. I’m not asking for scenes that show how they fell in love. But I wanted scenes that showed them being in love. The deep passion between them is the bedrock of the story, and because we only get a sense of it and don’t feel it, emotions like Hari’s betrayal and revenge and Saraswati’s desperation don’t hit as hard as they should. When Hari runs into Saraswati after a decade, she doesn’t immediately run into his arms or confess anything. She has chosen a path and she sticks with it. It would have sounded cheap if she had told her own story, as though she were begging for Hari’s (and our) sympathy. In that sense, the writing is still “clean”. But the emotions never hit a high.
That one issue apart, I enjoyed Dacoit a great deal. Despite the lack of a solid emotional grounding in the relationship, Hari and Saraswati come off as very sympathetic characters. They both have their issues. She has some kind of asthma. She calls it anxiety caused by stress. He is from an oppressed caste. The fact that she organises a blood donation camp on his birthday is a subtle message about equality, and the shattering climax drives it home even more. Every setup has a slow payoff. Saraswati knows the exact shade of colour that’s named “aquamarine”. At first, it just seems like a detail that an educated girl from a dominant caste would know, but later, the uneducated Hari takes this detail and makes it his own. In a way, he gives this colour back to her. On the surface, this is a cops-and-robbers movie, a chase movie, a dysfunctional love story – but the devil is in the details. The more you think about Dacoit, the more there is to savour.
