Rumours can be dangerous. From highschool rumours that snowball into fodder for bullying to misinformation campaigns that endanger lives, rumours can be dangerous. This is the premise of Sudhir Mishra’s Afwaah.
The film opens with a young politician Vicky Singh (Sumeet Vyas)’s incendiary speech leading to sloganeering, stone pelting, and violence as supporters clash with protestors. A man from Singh’s team Chandan Singh (Sharib Hashmi) and his goons escalate the matter. Chandan is seen following an innocent butcher into his shop and closing the shutter minutes after the man begged for his life.
A video of this incident goes viral and the politician and his fiancé Nivedita ‘Nivi’ Singh (Bhumi Pednekar) are both upset, for wildly different reasons. Vicky is worried that his political career is at stake and Nivi is disturbed by the events and the callousness with which her husband is viewing them. Their storyline gets entangled with that of an upper class Muslim man Rahab Ahmed (Nawazuddin Siddiqui).
By being in the wrong place at the wrong time with good intentions, he and Nivi are now on the run.
Over the duration of one night, Mishra explores how misinformation and fake news spreads through social media and weaponised against the innocent. And it is almost always the innocent and the underprivileged who are the victims of violence.
Before Ahmed gets embroiled in a fabricated ‘love jihad’ controversy, his life is comparatively more sheltered than the other Muslim people we encounter in the film. He rides by instances of mob violence in his fancy car with the windows keeping out almost all sound.
The imagery of the class divide is as effective as, if not reminiscent of, Dia Mirza’s character in Bheed.
The film also points a finger at the urban elite, oblivious to the reality right outside their door as a literature festival rages on. The image of the audience clapping as a man fights for his life has also been done before but is effective every time.
One qualm with the film would be that it does ignore the side of India’s population that may or may not be contained inside the walls of literature festivals and is fighting misinformation and communal violence every day.
Through Vicky and Chandan’s story, the film explores the idea of ‘loyalty’ and how something as pure as loyalty cannot be built on a foundation of hate. If ‘yahan koi kisi ka saga nahi hai’ (here, nobody is loyal to anyone) had a face, it would be this film.
Hate spreads fast and it is this dangerous aspect that makes hate hard to combat especially in the world of social media where rumours are spun for political and personal need.
To Mishra’s credit, the two major female characters Nivi and a female cop (TJ Bhanu) get decent storylines. Both are dealing with patriarchy and the dangers of their surroundings in their own way and neither is painted as a hapless victim. Both Pednekar and TJ Bhanu deliver incredible performances which is additionally true for every member of the cast.
Both actors embody the righteous fury of their characters and Siddiqui is believable as the US-return adman who has suddenly been exposed to the realities of his world. It’s also refreshing that the film doesn’t give us a ‘change of heart’ storyline and instead exposes the brutal reality that privilege shrouds people in a smokescreen that sometimes just makes them not care.
The one demerit of Mishra’s film is that we’ve seen it before. There is nothing new the film is offering, as powerful as its messaging is. Most of the happenings are predictable and sometimes do not result in the ‘gotcha’ moment one would hope for.
DOP Mauricio Vidal attempts to capture the nitty-gritties of the film’s setting but sometimes falters in the dimly lit scenes. The editing by Atanu Mukherjee is crisp and matches the sensitive lens that the filmmaker desires.
Afwaah speaks of a world where a mob can be incited by tweets (something we’ve seen happen), and implores its viewers to ask and inquire. ‘When you see content on social media, remember to ask questions’, the film urges. And yet the real question is, will anybody listen over the din of social media notifications?
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