Language: Hindi
The premise of A Thursday is guiltily compelling: a thematic successor to Neeraj Pandey’s A Wednesday (2008), for a new generation of live-streaming, quasi-activist Indians. (While the predecessor was a UTV production, this one is by RSVP; Ronnie Screwvala is the tangible link between the two spiritually related films.)
A Thursday has a fresh new protagonist whose quest for justice takes unsavoury turns. Naina Jaiswal (Yami Gautam Dhar) runs a playschool called Lil’ Tots for, you guessed it, little tots. She’s the kind of teacher that has every one of her wards practically eating out of her hands. It is a glorious South Bombay morning and there she is, streaming in along with the sunlight; gleaming eyes, incandescent smile and 16 tots in tow. The sunshine, both in her personality and in the film itself, disappears soon after, as she engineers a hostage situation and calls the cops in, so she can place her demands. (She’s able to set the whole thing up because her school is attached to her lawyer-fiancé’s fancy home, so it has some semblance of a tech-enabled security system.)
The lead cops who have to deal with this situation arrive on the scene fast enough. First, the visibly pregnant Catherine Alvarez (Neha Dhupia) whose jurisdiction it is, and then Javed Khan (Atul Kulkarni) who is called in as Naina’s first demand. And this trifecta of primary characters makes the setup intriguing straightaway. While Catherine and Javed have a history of their own, which threatens to spill over into the present delicate scenario, everything hinges on the ‘why’ of it all. Why is Naina doing this? What’s her ultimate objective? Her demands escalate quickly after calling Javed in – a ton of money, then a direct line to the visiting Prime Minister sahiba, Maya Rajguru (Dimple Kapadia).
It is around when the Prime Minister gets involved in the situation that the film begins to unravel, in more ways than one. It is, firstly, too slick for its own good. I tried hard to keep images of A Wednesday locked in a dark corner while watching this film, because apart from a one-line idea in common, they take on different hues quickly. The comparison became unavoidable because of the specific ways in which they differ. The former was gritty and felt real despite its audacious plot. This one is possibly even more audacious, but with the added woke-gloss of a Cosmo cover and all the nuance of a political rally.
A Wednesday was also so much about the battle of the veterans - two high-quality actors pitted against each other, through characters who match wits through an intricate web of events.
Here, there’s almost no matching of wits happening – Naina seemingly has all the control, with even the PM playing catch up. The few hiccups she faces are so minor, they might as well not have been there, because you know that nothing is going to stop the plot from moving along till the big reveal.
We’re also talking about two films that are set in two Indias with vastly different social situations. Our current version has demagoguery and the internet both available for cheap, so the popular stories of its time are imagined and told differently. Everything is dialled up, with no room for subtlety. A Thursday strives to be urgent, relevant and cool, but succeeds only partially, because it stops to make a point far too often. Like when the honchos at a channel providing non-stop coverage of the situation attempt to out-Navika even the Arnab-est of our real-life news broadcasters. And the final ‘point’ of the film, the answer to the ‘why’, is a build-up of all the mini-points along the way – the (pregnant) senior cop being brazenly undermined by her male superior, the Prime Minister who has to stop and talk about being a woman in the middle of an insane crisis because an aide reveals his sexism in the heat of the moment, revelations of Naina’s dependence on anti-depressants and suchlike.
Co-writer & director Behzad Khambata displays flashes of the chops required to make a decent thriller, most notably in scenes that require chaotic choreography. (Tried to remember the name of Khambata’s previous film, drew a Blank. You’re welcome.) He reserves the subtlety for a late twist or two, the seeds for which have gently been sown much earlier. A pity he didn’t consider exercising more of the same kind of economy of execution for the rest of the film, because his core message is an intense, powerful one. Its provocativeness would have done the heavy lifting for him.
You always know that Naina’s ‘why’ will be revealed as righting some form of injustice by the end of it. That is the point of a vigilante protagonist after all. Khambata is fully committed to exonerating Naina morally, if not legally, from her actions. On the surface of it, these actions are no different from that of a school shooter in the US. So that would make her a terrorist. In the context of this film, they don’t quite want her to be seen as that. It is a tantalising dilemma, this. The film attempts to provide vicarious gratification surrounding a fairly contentious issue through her. I’m not sure the Rohit Shetty brand of high-octane heart-tugging was the way to go with this one. Nevertheless, I also see Naina’s raison d’être being yet another highly polarised talking point. Perhaps that is a win for the film in itself.
I do expect Yami Gautam Dhar to be lauded for this performance, and deservedly so. It would have been even better had it been a little less self-aware, something closer to how she became Pari Mishra in Bala. Here, Naina Jaiswal flits between extremes of emotion. Did she intentionally not take her meds that fateful Thursday precisely because she didn’t want to numb her ferocious passion for her cause? I think so, but only now in retrospect, while writing about it. In the film, the gulf between those extremes is too wide to emotionally bridge, because Yami is a prisoner of the film’s non-stop emphasis on shock-value. Same goes for Atul Kulkarni and Dimple Kapadia – both as dependable as Yami, but both forced to play it up a few notches. And it is a pity they didn’t quite know what to do with Neha Dhupia’s Cathy Alvarez, after setting her up so well.
Personally, I’d have been more emotionally engaged with the meaty debate at the heart of A Thursday, if the film wasn’t so relentlessly trying to set our feelings on fire. But I will admit, I’m still eager to catch the reactions and chatter around the film’s core conflict once it is out.
Rating: 2.75/5
Watch the trailer here
Pradeep Menon is a Mumbai-based writer and independent filmmaker.
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