The colour khaki has ruled Indian cinema ever since Amitabh Bachchan angrily manned Zanjeer. But there was another film released a decade later which showed the bitter frustrations and raging impotence of being earnest in a language that was raw real and therapeutic. That film was Govinda Nihalani’s Ardh Satya.
I see Franklin Jacob’s Writer as a direct descendent of Ardh Satya. Simply, or not so simply, stunning…. The writer is the kind of rare film that will leave you haunted for days if not weeks. Police brutality is a serious crime in this country. Just when I thought no one and nothing could equal the bludgeoning impact of Vetrimaran’s Visaranai where every thwack of the danda on the custodial victims was like a personal blow to every member of the audience, along comes debutant director Franklin Jacob to tell us that when it comes to police brutality you can never say enough.
The writer is that squirm-inducing story of the innocent boy from the village held and tortured for no crime, that Jai Bhim was not. Its sledgehammer impact does not depend on melodrama or other excesses of cinematic expression like a maudlin overblown background score. Music is frugally used and a couple of songs that cropped up left me thoroughly outraged.
They were like ads popping up in the middle of the climax in Drishyam.
Without making contrived or contorted efforts to do so, the Writer conveys a climactic tension from the beginning to the devastating end. The set-up is a typical ‘choler-khaki’ scenario. Senior havaldar Thangraj (brilliant, Samuthirakani) is on the verge of retirement when he is sent on a punishment transfer to a police station where a young innocent boy Jayakumar (Hari Krishnan) is being held in a lodge by the police. News leaks out that police suspects are being confined in rented rooms.
All hell breaks loose and there is a heavy price to be paid for anyone with conscience in this monstrously corrupt system. It is to the lead actor Samuthirakani’s credit that he makes Thangraj vulnerable yet vital. If he intervenes in the wrongful confinement of a boy who is clueless about what’s happening to him.
To his credit, the director doesn’t crowd Jayakumar’s horrific plight with overt sentimentality. Of course, we are allowed to feel sorry for him(why would we not!) but there is no attempt at manipulation our responses, at least none until the entire filth and corruption of the police department is pushed on one senior cop, a bully played well by Kavin Jay Babu who is the Gabbar Singh of this yell-in-hell yarn.
The treatment of corruption in the police force and the sudden swerve into assassination at the end reminded me of Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya where the cop-hero was mocked and emasculated by seedy corrupt politicians.
But what to do when the enemy is within you? The writer crosses the yellow line cordoning the scene of the crime, to plunge into the darkness that divides civil conduct from its opposite, not sanctioned by law but approved by the lawmakers. It is a remarkable work filled with shocks and surprises but never designed to lure you into its lair of lies and subterfuge.
My only grouse: why does the villain-cop break into passages of Hindi? Is this to say that he is the scummy migrant in Chennai, the dirty fish in the clean pond. If so, then the film owes us an apology too. Injustice is not for the lower-caste weaklings like Jaya Kumar. It’s all around us.
Another recent film that shed a harsh light on the soul-damaging conditions that cops work under was the Malayalam Nayattu. I am fully certain now that the renaissance in Indian cinema is coming to us through Kerala. Every month there is one masterpiece in Malayalam if not two. I could barely get Dileesh Pothen’s Joji out of my head when this one creeps upon us like a motion-picture meteor tearing through many of notions on the vicious cycle that controls the relationship between the common man and the government machinery.
There have been brilliant films on police brutality in recent times, the Tamil Varnan being the most recent one. Before that, there was Vetrimaaran’s Visaranai in Tamil. So graphic in its brutality it made you flinch.
Nayattu provides the view from the other side. Three cops in a Kerala police station of different ages and ranks get embroiled in a case of police brutality that sends them on the run and ends in the only way a tragedy as topical and burning as this can end. Nayattu takes about 30 minutes to warm up. Once the three cops’ escape from sure-punishment for a crime they haven't committed kicks in, the narrative pace is breakneck breathless, and unstoppable.
Very often when a director adopts the thriller format for a socio-politically relevant theme, the ‘message’ gets submerged in style, and the substance is lost in posturing. Not here. Not this time. Director Martin Prakkat(whose last film Charlie with Dulquer Salman was a cult hit) manages a near-impossible balance of headlines immediacy and a far deeper thematic thrust and relevance which question a system of governance where the oppressor and the oppressed eventually become one. This is what happens with the three cops Maniyan(Joju George), Praveen Michael(Kunchako Boban), and the lone woman among the two men Sunitha(Nimisha Sajayan, the richly lauded protagonist from yet another Malayalam masterpiece of 2021 The Great Indian Kitchen). It is to the three actors’ credit that their kinship in crisis doesn’t need to be constructed by the plot. From the moment they are thrown together in the crisis, they seem to share some kind of an anguished camaraderie that doesn’t depend on extraneous props and trappings. They are cops by choice and fugitives by fluke.
Organically and effortlessly the director follows his three heroes through their nightmarish road trip which never runs out of fuel, never loses momentum. There are times when I nearly stopped breathing. Till the last, I was holding my breath to see how this monstrous mess would end.
I can’t say the ending is conclusive or even satisfying to me as an audience. But I am not surprised that director Martin Prakkat and his writer Shahi Kabir leave us with more questions than answers about a system and work ethic where corruption is a byword. The director’s eye for detail and his keen observation of human behavior during a crisis make Nayattu a remarkable journey into the heart of darkness.
The three main actors seem to have been born in khaki. My favourite moment in the film is when Sunitha has her periods in the forest in the hills and her colleague plods down to the nearest market to get her pads. But before that their impoverished host senses her discomfort takes off his only clean dhoti and gives it to her quietly. This show of empathy in a relentlessly speeding narrative is like a slap in the face. We have created our hell when we could have created the other alternative just as well.
Police atrocity plays a crucial part in Mari Selvaraj’s Tamil neo-classic Karnan. This is not just a film. It is a movement. A wake-up call for all Indians who think all men are born equal(what about the women? That, some other time). Get real. The caste system still exists in various forms. Inequality is in our DNA. Anubhav Sinha tore through the caste system in his masterpiece Article 15 …or perhaps “tore” is not exactly what he did. The tone was far more gentle, the approach sweetly savage.
In Karnan, the director Mari Selvaraj’s anger is stamped (like a heavy boot on a cowering face) on every frame. It is safe to assume that Dhanush plays the director’s alter ego. A seething living exploding fireball of indignation. Dhanush, in one of his best performances, plays Karnan the only loud unstoppable voice of protest in a tiny village in Tamil Nadu which probably doesn’t exist on the map.
It’s a village of lower caste people forever oppressed humiliated and ostracized from the mainstream. One of the villagers’ primary anguish has to do with no bus stopping at their village. The authorities just don’t think they are of any consequence. While the other villagers accept their fate as nobodies why does one young man feel so strongly about it? Why does Karnan seethe with anger every time a bus refuses to stop in his village? Or a child dies on the road for the lack of medical attention(this is before the Covid when every human life had the right to healthcare)? Or when, in that moment of supreme eruption, elders of the godforsaken village are bundled and taken to the thana and thrashed all night?
Is this socially acceptable behaviour? Shockingly it is. For the downtrodden underdogs, living at ground level, humiliation subjugation and manipulation are an everyday occurrence. All men are born unequal, some like the villagers in Kodiyankulam are more unequal. This jolting brutally violent film serves as a timely warning to all of us locked away in our citadels. India is simmering with discontent. We are sitting on a hotbed of exploitation that can erupt anytime. That small nondescript village in Karnan becomes a microcosm of the Great Indian Reality. Ignore at your own risk.
I have seen innumerable seething simmering films about social injustice. None so tense and implosive. I’ve seen any number of angry heroes. None as angry as Karnan. As played by Dhanush he is the voice of a voiceless village. The hand that won’t hold itself back. The face of the social protester who is no poster boy. He will act. He will kill. He won’t be stopped. Dhanush is so volatile I have never felt more compromised, more a part of the socio-economical system that allows a handful to have all the wealth and power.
To be honest I have never seen a film like Karnan. It rambles and roars, dances, and writhes as it explores the dynamics of exploitation with a straightforwardness that eschews any kind of cinematic deceit. And yet strangely enough it is filled with allegorical allusions and metaphors including a masked girl child indicative of the faceless victim, and a donkey with its two front legs tied which Karnan frees before the climactic violence(get it?)
At its heart, Karnan is a distinctly violent film. The carnage at the climax will make your stomach churn, as it is meant to. You cannot turn away from the savagery. Avoidance is not an option. Karnan puts you right in the vortex of the violent underbelly that the higher classes have willy-nilly nurtured. It will make your blood boil. This is a no-frills drama authentic almost-documentary like drama filmed on an epic canvas with mobs running towards us with sticks rods boulders and their wrath. It scoffs at melodrama and music(the songs are sharply critical folk tunes, or shall we call them fork tunes?).
It is a drama of heightened realism where the hero rides into the carnage of his village on a horse. It is a frightening fascinating unforgettable film that you would give anything to forget. But it won’t go away. It tells us that the underprivileged won’t be ignored anymore. And why. The performances are beyond brilliant, as is the camerawork(Theni Eswar), music(Santhosh Narayanan) ….and the razor-sharp editing(Selva RK) which creates an illusion of a lazy narrative only to bludgeon us with a scathing eruption of violence which we may or may not see coming. How does it matter?
Cinema soaked in the bleached colours of khaki never follows a uniform code. They are neither pro nor anti-establishment. They are what they are. Reflections on the reality of the police force in India: underpaid, feared, and often accused of brutality against the innocent. Not an unearned reputation, as these films, show so vividly.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He's been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.
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