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?
