NH10

                                                                       

Spoilers ahead.

With NH10, Anushka Sharma has clearly stolen a march over all her contemporaries, who will now have to spend months and months to catch up.

Here’s what happened: while Deepika Padukone was busy being fighting on Twitter for her rights to dress as she liked and Parineeti Chopra was teaching ignorant journalists what periods are all about, Sharma was nowhere in the news. She didn’t create a storm with her opinion on the AIB roast, no one used her as an idol to fight against skinniness and most critics (including me, initially), were ready to write her off as the one who can only do the Dilli ki ladki routine.

That is, until now.  So while all her contemporaries were busy championing modern womanhood while constantly playing props to heroes in extremely bad quality movies (Padukone’s Happy New Year, anything Sonakshi Sinha has acted in except for Lootera, and the younger Chopra’s Dawat e Ishq), Sharma took up Jaggu in PK, with cropped hair and no affectations.

 Parineeti Chopra tried that a bit in Hasee Toh Phasee but since that was more misuse of the look than use, PK’s Jaggu won hands down. 

Then came NH10, in which she joined hands with a bunch of people including Anurag Kashyap and gave us a movie that has zero Bollywood clichés. OK, near-zero Bollywood clichés.

Dear Anushka Sharma, I doubt you can resist all along, but please don’t go back to being  arm candy instantly.

There is no happy ending in NH10. There is no deus ex machina that can save the day. There is a lot of darkness, no mincing of words and no effort to soften the blows for the audience. And the best part? There are no jarring item numbers to ensure the audience goes home happy, or slyly weaved in sexy shots of women’s bodies to “cut the tension”. 

NH10 is a story of the two Indias that economists, politicians and social reformers are at a loss of how to reconcile.  It is the story of what happens when through accident and foolhardiness, residents of the democratic India run into people from Khap Panchayat lands.

Sharma’s Meera is the person you and I and most people we know are —she has a well paying job, can look after herself, can take on misogynistic colleagues as needed and is married to a person who makes her happy, to whom she complains about having to attend parties.

One night on her way to work, she is believably (because it is Gurgaon) accosted by goons, after which her husband, Arjun (played by Neil Bhoopalam) buys her a gun for protection.

And that’s that, until they are on a road trip that goes terribly awry. The young couple is placed square in the middle of the kind of situation we all pray never to be faced with and only read about in newspapers. In the hinterland of Haryana, there’s an honour killing. Arjun’s bravado makes them targets of crazed goons who want them dead.

Director Navdeep Singh obviously knows the Jatland extremely well. And those who remember Manorama Six Feet Under will remember he can do thrillers well too.

Join the two together and you will get the picture.  Singh’s characters are well rounded, right from the village sarpanch to the police officer to the leader of the goon pack, who thinks nothing of hacking his sister to death but wails like a child on losing his brother.

NH10 also does not treat the audience like they are stupid—there are no long dialogues/monologues to spell out what is happening or will happen. The show, don’t tell, works fantastically in the sequence where we see the Haryanvi, writhing with pain, still bristling on seeing a woman smoking.  Or in the final sequence, where despite the horror of it all, you’ll still appreciate the absolute lack of high drama from Sharma.

There’s one tiny problem I see with the movie, and it’s nothing to do with the cast and crew, but with storytelling.

 NH10 could not have picked a better time for its release, what with all the angst against the banning of the BBC documentary.  While I absolutely love that this movie was made, to my mind, it would have been a perfect 10 if the makers could have found a way to unequivocally put across the thought, that there’s no greatness or pride in following the demonic tenets of the Khap-ruled hinterlands, even if those are centuries old rules.

Like the policeman in the movie, there’re a lot of people out there who believe “Gurgaon mein jahaan yeh aakhri mall khatam hote hain na, wahin aapki democracy aur constitution bhi khatam ho jaata hain.” In varying degrees, at least. 

My fear is of those people. That there could be a chance smart dialogues like these turn into some sort of validation for those real-life policemen who truly roam the lands, making the perpetrators into heroes, the same way SRK’s dysfunctional  Rahul in Darr (or any similar movie) stoked the imagination of many street side stalkers.  All women who grew up in the 90s will have some idea of what I’m talking about, no?