When Vishal Bhardwaj turned filmmaker at the dawn of the new millennium, it was a crisis point in Hindi cinema, one where our films were mutating from the moral paradigm of the 90s. The music director who churned out hummable songs stupefied everyone with his confidence of putting Shakespeare into an Indian setup first with Maqbool, and bringing out characters that were amoral, settings that were real, and treatment that carried a heart of darkness.
One of the great aspects of Shakespeare’s oeuvre is that it encapsulates the very idea of art by recording the essential experience of being human, in infinite shades of grey. It was only apt then that Bhardwaj chose to adapt him in no man’s land, between the uptight borders of black and white.
Udta Punjab, the new film by Vishal Bhardwaj’s protégé Abhishek Chaubey, starts at this very border, albeit a literal one, where a man throws a pack of drugs like a discus from his side to the opposite. That pack of drugs lands directly on the Indian side, specifically in the state of Punjab, skipping no man’s land. A very remarkable beginning, but this scene also marks the film’s stand, i.e. black and white.
With a swift beginning, and a dash of realism, the film introduces its characters and starts off with economic precision. But soon, all gets abandoned when the maker sits down to tell us one important truth, drugs are bad, even with a character spelling it out in layman’s terms how it impacts the family. Yes, in a film marked for adults. Nothing wrong there, but no insight either into why these youngsters would pursue a state of perpetual sub-consciousness.
If the shadows of Traffic (2001) lurk all around the corner in this ensemble drama as inspiration, how did it miss what made Steven Soderbergh’s film so dazzling? That the audience knows how to join the dots, supplying the thought without ever preaching it out. The perpetrators of the drug trade are made to be evil in a clean sweep of dehumanisation, without a single attempt to understand the nature of their cold-bloodedness, in a film supposedly based on comprehensive research.
If Kareena’s Preet Sahani raises the red flag as the film’s chest-thumping conscience by explaining in a grand exercise of mundaneness, even becoming the reluctant detective, we get curious about the unfolding of the other side. But no, the bad people require no dissection, and there you have acts of heroism minus the villain.
Fine, the film wants us to see the hell the victims descend into. While Alia’s girl with no name gets forced into it, for the other characters, like Tommy or Balli, we find them in their present state of drug-addled headiness.
Despite spending time with them, we hardly get a peek into why they wish to lose their sense of self aided by a drug? What we get is a set of scenes of drug abuse, without an inclination to show psychological insight of their crisis.
Is it wrong to take such a moral stand when drugs are a genuine menace? Clearly, no. But is it wrong to view the drugged and the un-drugged in such definite shades of black and white? Your guess is as good as mine, but it’s as simplistic as gets. And most reviews of the film have categorically told us that it doesn’t glorify drugs, as a duty after the Pahlaj Nihalni censorship fiasco. A moral victory, you see.
But does a feature film require to do what PSAs do? They can, like Manoj Kumar did with great success in many films. But it can be a cause of great distress if it’s coming from one of Hindi cinema’s gifted contemporary filmmakers.
Chaubey is the filmmaker whose first film Ishqiya was 500 shades of grey in Hindi hinterland, and like his mentor Bhardwaj, he chose the road between right and wrong, and made us relish the amoral framework. His second, Dedh Ishqiya might not have had the bite of the first, but it dealt with silhouettes of subtlety and offered more than what obviousness could. When his third film Udta Punjab was announced (without a doubt, one cracker of a title in a long time) about the growing drug issue in northern state of Punjab, expectations refused to go for the reality check. The check took place in the very first scene of the film, where a man wears a Pakistani jersey to tell us the source, even though we knew what those barbed wires meant.
If the moral spine wasn’t righteous enough, a lot of ‘spelling it out’ follows, along with contrivances that can turn a city into a rubble.
If Alia’s character struggles to keep her Bihari accent uniform, Kareena’s Preet whimsically mismatches her expressions with the gravity of her scenes. If her snooping around with Diljit’s Sartaj looks truly amateur, Tommy’s (Shahid) journey of finding his kudi can give Manmohan Desai style coincidences a run for their money. But the most distinguished of them all, Sartaj’s romantic scene aided by a drug injection was straight out of a yearly staple of bhang episodes in Indian soaps, which are usually loathed by the intelligentsia. To top it all, Preet actually asked Sartaj out for coffee turning the most recognisable table.
So on and so forth.
This is not an attempt to nitpick, but to mourn the descent of a filmmaker who holds much promise in his skill to show us a brave new world. Udta Punjab is a film that has some really stunning moments, memorable characters, a few really astonishing performances and is far better than the average Bollywood fare we are so used to. But in totality, it’s a missed possibility of something that could have been great, because it so badly wants to cling to the uprightness, by explaining what not to do, in a loud and clear voice.
For all it’s worth, Mr Chaubey, like Dr Preet Sahani, can very well choose to become our voice of conscience, holding a moral flag to show us what’s bad in our society. But that would be one irrevocable tragedy, for he has more in him than to become the Madhur Bhandarkar of intelligent mainstream cinema.
(The writer is a journalist and screenwriter who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. His Twitter handle is @RanjibMazumder)
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