Satyagraha

Satyagraha is way worse than those Government-sponsored public service announcements you see before a feature film. The late unfortunate ‘Mukesh’ who died of tobacco-induced cancer is a cult icon among Barodian audiences. After a screening of Satyagraha, he might become a God.

Prakash Jha’s passionless Pseudo-Kranti is an infuriatingly bad affair you need to give a miss. Go start a dharna against this film instead. Not Gandhi style – a full-on Bhagat Singh humlaa! This film is of the standard of a local UP ‘action-drama-masala’ film, albeit with a well-known cast and crew, and bigger budget. And STILL the film manages to be shoddy, and I wonder how Jha and his team could overlook mistakes like ‘It’s raining, yet everyone’s dry’ and ‘An IPAD video is fully audible at a noisy club’? The film’s condition is way worse than what poor Mukesh would’ve gone through in his final days. Better to leave it to die peacefully in empty theatres.

Only Prakash Jha would feel it’s not cliched to begin a political film about civil resistance with the tune of ‘Raghupati Raghavi’. In fact, he extends the bhajan to a three-minute song towards the end of the film and perhaps thinks his audience will be moved. I squirmed in my seat, so he did move me in a way.

This guy has been greatly influenced by nukkad nataks and rural plays, and you detect this throughout Satyagraha. His film isn’t made of characters but rather representations, who are broadly divided into good and evil. Stock characters are abundant, especially in group scenes, where a supporter goes ‘Support him!’ while an opposer goes ‘Don’t support him!’. Corrupt guys wander with an easily detectable air of corruption, while good guys sport ‘Ab aur kitna sahenge?!’ look in every scene. And shudder – a widowed lady actually says lachrymosely ‘Ab hamara kya hoga?’, a line you won’t hear much even in television serials these days. Vishal Bharadwaj used the theatrical nukkad natak style infinitely better in his last film ‘Matru Ki Bijli Ka Mandola’. It could’ve worked here, but it doesn’t. Why? Because Prakash Jha and cinematographer Sachin Krishna do nothing with a camera to create a distinctive visual aesthetic that was required to make these characters and their situations engaging.

Their group scenes are filmed like simple group scenes, the most obvious choice (and most egregious in case of an out-of-place love song) of music accompanies scenes, the script (co-written by Jha) is so unwholesomely calculated to work within the decided genre it works like a puppet-show where you so-obviously know what’s going to happen, and the dialogues are stale (as in BOLD UNDERLINED ITALICIZED ‘stale’).

This pseudo-kranti movie has a Pseudo-Gandhi/Anna figure in the form of Dwarka Anand (Amitabh Bachchan), who is austere to a barf-worthy extent. He is so khadoos, he puts down his guest with a cold lecture on ‘Evils of Money’, when the latter speaks about capitalism, privatisation and money-making in a positive light. That guest is Manav (Ajay Devgn), a close friend of Dwarka Anand’s sanskaari beta Akhilesh (Indraneil Sengupta), who defines his life’s ambition clearly: ‘500 million in 5 years, 1 billion in 10 years’. He plans of going abroad, and doesn’t mind bending rules in the play of business to make a better gain.

That’s against Anand’s principles, so the two men are at loggerheads (Manav’s quite kinder, actually) until Akhilesh dies in a road accident, his widowed wife Sumitra (Amrita Rao, in the oh-so-familiar Amrita Rao mode) is humiliated by an official when she requests for the government compensation promised by the film’s antagonist, politician Balram Singh (Manoj Bajpai, who seems to lampoon his performance in Gangs of Wasseypur; remember that humorous scene where Sardar Khan, his character in GOI, threatens to riot his enemy Ramadhir Singh’s territory), and Anand is sent to jail for slapping the arrogant official. That’s when Manav stalls his former plans and begins his Satyagraha, a peaceful protest against the treatment meted out to Anand. Many youngsters join him, with word spreading on their Facebook page. He is also supported by Yasmin Ahmed, a fearless journalist who cancels her meeting with the prime-minister to support his cause (Kareena Kapoor is a reporter mode and a god-awful performance). It grows big with the support of local unofficial leader Arjun (Arjun Rampal, duh!) and massive when Anand decides to take on corruption on a bigger stage. A stage big enough for the sappy version of Raghupathi Raghava. Nahi!!

There’s only one scene where towards the end of the film where Bachchan momentarily overcomes the badness of Prakash Jha’s creation, but that doesn’t last long with BLARING ‘Satyagraha!’ roar hitting us like that promo of the film ‘BOSS’, where you want to scream ‘SHUT THE HECK UP!’. All these actors lack the spirit and unfailing determination you could see on the faces of Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal when they took on the governement. A press conference scene in the movie looks so unconvincing and rehearsed, I found that fake press conference held on the sixth season of Bigg Boss more believable.

Satyagraha is super disappointing, and tests the limits of human patience. I suggest you spend your time renting a DVD of Dibakar Banerjee’s ‘Shanghai’ instead. Don’t encourage Jha into thinking you have joined his satyagraha.

ourvadodara.in Rating Guide:

* = Avoid!!

** = Rent It / TV Premiere

*** = Book The Cheapest Seats

**** = Book The Best Seats

***** = Book The Best Seats + Buy The DVD!