The Enhanced Political Aesthetics of Devashish Makhija’s Joram

I watched Joram last week and something about how the film unfolds, struck me. Devashish Makhija has managed to do many things right with his storytelling that is filled with a political spirit as it moves ahead as a chase-thriller-revenge saga. There is a narrative thread that goes in accordance with the structures of screenplay writing; but along with that, it doesn’t compromise its politics in attempt to just have a fuller story. The elements of politics merge well within the story and if anything, only further accentuate its effect. By doing so, ‘Joram’ may have just become one of the very few Indian films that doesn’t succumb to just become a film with a good heart with an unreasonable and lazy narrative.

It stands in direct contrast with another film that released earlier this year, Sudhir Mishra’s Afwaah. It had a similar plot where a man is wrongly accused of something and he in on the run from powerful people who are after his life. However, the film suffered from making its entire politics feel like headlines from newspapers. It failed to bring out the political conflicts through its narrative and rather, the politics had to be spitted out upfront in order to make sense. There was more display of the political scenario than a thoughtful reflection. That way, it ended up feeling more like a well-meaning pamphlet than a powerful film.

Joram, on the other hand seems to be aware of these pitfalls. Devashish Makhija operates carefully as he builds the story. There is a proper layering of the political conflicts done that drives the thriller aspects ahead and vice versa. The back story of Dasru(Manoj Bajpayee) as a Naxalite proves fatal for him in the current times as he lives in the city to leave behind his tribal roots. However, all of it comes back to haunt him one day when another character eyes him with vengeance. What follows then is not just a cat-and-mouse chase that is devoid of a larger meaning. The chase becomes symbolic of the way current state machineries are always boiled up in hammering blow after blow on the existence of tribals. Everything is intricately crafted where the politics find a release with help of the narrative and never in isolation. One is driven by the other and also, it is never didactic. He creates frames that silently exist in the film. Like the one where Dasru and his 3-month-old daughter are sitting below a wall that has some section of the Indian Constitution painted on it.

There is another scene that is so curiously well-thought and shown with a dutiful gaze. A cop, Ratnakar(played with an unfounded restraint by Mohammed Zeeshan Ayub) comes to a dilapidated police station in Chhatisgarh, and spots three tribal boys jailed for a ridiculous reason. Ratnakar feels bad for them as is evident from his face. Just the way his entire character is designed, makes him to not fall into the cliches of typical social dramas, where the protagonist usually comes across injustice and wants to make things better. Often during such scenes in films there is hardly any agency carried by the oppressed. But here we see the tribal boys through a lens which doesn’t make us feel pity for them. They exist while being in hold of their self-respect and dignity. Makhija makes sure not to suck away humanity from the boys by making them images of trauma gazed from a lens of overt sympathy. Rather, we see them just blocked within the cell, their faces barely visible. They are 3 tribals occupying darkness.

In the next scene, Ratnakar goes to his room in the back side of the station and from there, he stands looking in the direction of the jail. He looks at the three tribal prisoners, but the camera never points on them through his eyes. We just see him and then expect to have his POV shot of the boys in the next cut. However, Devashish chooses to give a completely opposite point of view when we look at Ratnakar from the shoulders of the tribals instead. The camera is pitted behind their backs in the cell. His body gets almost trapped within their shoulders. The moment is but just a few seconds long but goes on to say way too much. This fine detail in the filmmaking is what makes Joram truly revelatory.

There are many more such examples in the film right from its harrowing opening scene which finds an even stronger resolve towards the end. It comes in full circle when Dasru comes back to the same place where years ago he was watching his wife sing a song while riding on a swing tied up to a huge tree. The entire land is now dug up to make place for a mining plant. The tree, which stood flamboyant on their land, now has become just a dried up, scrawny patch of wood. Dasru looks at the dried patch of land and Makhija again lingers his camera for some time in the moment. He stretches time to make us feel what Dasru does in that pertinent moment. The slowed down scene is filled with a deep sense of loss of life and identity for Dasru whose home has been uprooted to the ground by the wild claws of the state and crony capitalists. The entire sequence is truly a landmark in poetry through visuals.

Devashish Makhija has applied the tools of filmmaking to extend meanings to a political reality. He makes sense of the politics with his new founded aesthetics. It is how some writers think while writing and make hitherto unknown connections while being in the process of writing. Similarly, Makhija finds novel creative means to come up with powerful scenes. His cinematic language takes upon the story and makes it grasp finer meanings. By choosing such a grammar for his filmmaking, Devashish Makhija undoes what popular cinema has been doing while telling stories of the oppressed. He subverts the gaze and finds a solution to have it looked upon in a different way that is nuanced and empathetic in its reflection. It is a quietly remarkable feat.

Animal: It is not the film which is a problem, but the filmmaker

Just the other day, I was thinking about how my ability and patience to sit through any film have now increased, and I don’t easily get bored or put off by them as I used to some years ago. I said to myself that I can watch any film now and thought of re-visiting all the films that I have closed in between due to their different appeal and unconventional pace. I was ready now. However, I didn’t know that just within days I would be sitting in a film, tiptoeing to make a decision between storming out and staying. I didn’t know that within days, someone could make a film like Animal that would just make me want to dismiss it completely.

Not because it has some unconventional storytelling that is just difficult to get hold of or has a really arduous way of moving the plot ahead, or because it has no plot at all. But a film that has everything right other than the filmmaker’s vile motives for which he is making it, due to which everything else turns out to be like his mind: disruptive, disgusting, and just absolutely deplorable to witness.

I would like to drift further to another film that was released earlier this year that made me think of something crucial about the nature of cinema on my second viewing. The film I am talking about is ‘Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani’, which uses emotions and storytelling devices to break societal notions. The particular moment in the film when Ranveer Singh dances on ‘Dola Re Dola’, made me realize how truly powerful the medium itself is. Its myriad ways can make you believe in new ways of seeing and thinking about the world. It can challenge what you thought you knew and present a completely different point of view, which you cannot help but root for. When emotions take over a particular concept and make their way to your heart through the journeys taken by characters. Cinema can achieve all of that through its techniques. RRKPK truly did that and represented the very nature of cinema for me. It is a virtue to be a filmmaker, and it is a triumph to tell a good story. And yet, like all virtues, even this one has its shortcomings. If the same tools can be used to destroy a regressive idea, they can be used to construct it too.

With ‘Animal’, Sandeep Reddy Vanga just wants to do that. Seeing Ranbir Kapoor, Anil Kapoor, and all the other thousand goons on the screen, there is a sharp presence of Vanga. He is the one, superimposing himself through the frames and giving an evil laugh while he looks at the audience looking at him. It is not Ranbir Kapoor’s Ranvijay or Bobby Deol’s Abrar who is the most dangerous, but Mr. Vanga, who is reflected through them. I am not even talking about the many ways in which the film is trying to be something completely vile. In a film where there is so much psychological trauma, distress, and a crumbling father-son bond in place, nothing is worthy of spending more time than just investing in the curious case of Sandeep Reddy Vanga.

Here is a storyteller (for I truly believe he is a good one if he just comes out of the shell he has created for himself) who is making a film 100 times more violent and incessantly, self-consciously, more problematic than his previous films. He acts like a toddler, who, when told not to do something, turns defensive and does it harder. He acts like all those men who, when told that they are wrong, don’t turn inward and introspect but rather take it upon themselves to do it even more the next time. That’s what he promised in the interview he gave to Anupama Chopra. When the creator of a world is a person who, when told not to pluck a flower from a plant, will instead break off the roots of the entire garden, it is futile to even say anything about the world he creates. Like his characters, he won’t bow down and accept; he won’t introspect and change, but just the opposite. Never has the fact that ‘a piece of art reflects the life of the artist’, been more true than in his case.

Through the 3 hours and 21 minutes of sheer massacre that we are shown on screen, there are minute glimpses of what Sandeep Reddy Vanga could really have been if he really was an authentic human as well. Especially in the climax, where Ranbir Kapoor and Anil Kapoor finally sit down to talk. It is a powerfully written scene and portrays the toxic nature of their relationship beautifully. If only Sandeep Vanga focused on creating more such scenes rather than just wanting to be a college-going knucklehead who will just do everything opposite of what he is told to.

In that respect, ‘Animal’ doesn’t work as a film. How will it, when the narrative has other venomous goals than just providing a resolution to the story; when the story is just a means to peddle into the arrogant mind of the maker who wants to show the world that he will keep doing only that, and in a much greater capacity, for which he has been criticized? It is a highly toxic masculine trait that causes a lot of anguish in many men. It is not his characters that need fixing; it is him.

‘Animal’ is a classic example of how to ruin a good story by bringing your grudges into it. It could have truly been a complex exploration of so many things that have not happened as much in mainstream Hindi cinema. It chooses to base itself on the truly disruptive mind of the character but then takes a completely different turn to show its real destination, which is nothing like what the correct destination would have been. It is Sandeep Reddy Vanga being truly, comfortably self-indulgent to an extent that he even crosses the boundary of arrogance to reach a stage beyond that. If films are made with such motives, how do we call them films?

I would refrain from making such dictatorial statements and leave the film as it is. If it were up to me, I would want to forget that I sat through the 3 and a half hours of mindless, venomous, blood-thirsty egoistic exploitation of the medium masquerading as a film. I am no purist, and I don’t want to define what film is and what it isn’t; however, with how Animal plays out and, more importantly, the skewed dimensions that it brings of the filmmaker, it makes me want to dismiss it to the core.