shaitan

i missed a lot of the media hype over this film, as a result of which i went to watch the film with a few friends without actually knowing what it was about. all i had gathered about the film was that it’s a film about 5 rich college-going, junkie teenagers getting caught in something dark – an idea that, i admit, is very vague. if told to describe the film in one concise sentence, however long, the word ‘vague’ would still sum up the intent of that sentence.

between telling the story of 5 rich, rash kids, drug addiction, corruption, the usual police thrashing, dysfunctional families, monetary pressures of the city, media hyperactivity and insensitivity, earning respect for the police department and moral constructs of society, the film seemed a lot longer than the 2 hours it promised. there was too much going on together in the film, and very few of them seemed to blend. in an effort to create several layers in the film, Bejoy seems to have spun chaos in his film.

in several ways, the film was severely unconvincing – from the conversation that Kalki first has with KC (Gulshan Devaiya) to the killing of the ‘shaitan’ in the house of god. the struggles and stories of Kalki’s friends are skimmed over to make space for her painful past, thus making them near insignificant in the story.  save for Kalki’s traumatic history, which Bejoy mercilessly brings up repeatedly in the film through, mostly, disheveled hair and bleeding eye mascara, the film seems to go on about characters who one doesn’t care about or feel intrigued by. Tanya’s (Kirti Kulhari) image issues, for example, whether physical or cool-quotient related, are conveniently glimpsed over, thus making her look rather dimwitted and annoying. the characters don’t evoke any sympathy or even seem like they belong somewhere.

the kids exist in a nowhere space of daddy-pays-it-all-because-i’m-messed-up. okay, maybe i shouldn’t be so harsh; but driving around the city with a drug peddler thrice convicted for dealing in drugs says a lot about their intelligence quotient. with all due respect to the issue of drug abuse that Bejoy tries to address, we don’t see any of them pining for cocaine, except for Kalki who, towards the last 15-20 mins of the film, obsessively consumes cocaine and keeps rambling about her dead mother. by this time, we’re so overwhelmed by the constant reference to her past that we’re just waiting for the credits to start rolling.

what could have earned sympathy was their reaction to the hit and run incident in the middle of the night. but there is a day long feeling of remorse and guilt, and then the focus shift to getting themselves out of trouble by bribing the policeman. the plan to raise the money is inspired by a corny story about a friend who staged his brother’s abduction to earn money off his parents. when the media picks up on the abduction of a millionaire’s daughters and her friends, the plan changes to one that earns them extra money!

while following the story of 5 insignificant people one really doesn’t care about, there is the story of Mathur (Rajeev Khandelwal) – the honest, bad-ass indian policeman. he represents that part of the police department which chooses to survive on the peanuts that the department pays them, but refuses to give in to bribery and other unlawful means to earn money. Bejoy doesn’t compartmentalise him as the ‘good cop’; he shows him almost giving in to the bribe way out of a mess, thus colouring him more human.

Bejoy also branches out into Mathur’s personal life, which begins with a sweet waking-the-husband-up scene only to reveal the present tension between the couple through silences and the taking away of a Van Gogh painting from the house of a policeman earning Rs 8,500 a month (as mentioned in the film). (my intent is not to be judgmental or classist, but it all seems a little unreal. the only thing it does, is adding to the ‘hipness’ of the film). the only other time it comes up  in the film in a major way is when a government official scrutinizes the divorce forms as Mathur and his wife file for divorce, thus mocking, very effectively, the institution of marriage. but where the relevance of this lies in the film, i do not know.

what is also difficult to miss is the picture of a morality structure that Bejoy draws for us. he explores the devil in us, using the kids’ story as his medium. the devil pushes them to extents which drive them to murder, bribery, spite and also become the cause of their own death. they run from one hell to another and finally land up in the house of god where they duly pay for their misdoings or redeem themselves. suddenly it’s all over; the dead friend is honoured and the dead peddler friend is labelled the sole cause of the chaos – all this aided by the police department in order to keep the people’s faith going in a disciplinarian for society. the power politics of all this was a little too twisted for me.

the film is driven by good performances by everyone and a soundtrack that packs in a good punch. together these two take the film through. Kalki Koechlin and Rajeev Khandelwal’s performance together outshone everything else the film had to offer.