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Getting an audience to detest a movie villain isn’t difficult. People are cynical; all they want is someone to project their frustrations on. But getting the same viewers to genuinely empathise with the protagonist of your film isn’t as easy as it might seem. It requires them to lower their guards and shed their egos; to allow moments of vulnerability in the presence of absolute strangers. Most of all, it requires them to ignore the objectively lunatic act of developing a connection with a made-up person, as if they are real. But Vasan Bala has cracked the code in Jigra — a film that pulls off this almost impossibly difficult feat by getting you, the viewer, to participate in the grandest act of collective empathy crafted on a Bollywood screen this year.
After building a career on irreverent genre films, it’s somewhat surprising to see that the most effective parts of Jigra are the ones in which Bala is being absolutely earnest. To be clear, he finds plenty of room for his trademark cine-literate flourishes — there are cameos, on-the-nose hat-tips to master filmmakers, and several other overt and covert references to past classics. At one point, someone literally name drops Wong Kar-wai and Kim Ki-duk. A separate article, perhaps, can be written on the singularly subversive act of placing a Nicolas Winding Refn reference in a movie that opens with the Kuch Kuch Hota Hai theme. But here’s the thing; all of this is just adornment. What truly makes Jigra a great movie is, funnily enough, the Dharma-ism at its core.
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Alia Bhatt stars as Satya, a young woman so deeply shaped by personal trauma that it appears to define every decision that she makes in her life. Satya and her brother, Ankur, were only children when they silently witnessed their father jump to his death. She gets flashbacks of this moment on several carefully selected occasions in the film, none of which feel exploitative. After their father’s suicide, Satya and Ankur were seemingly sent off to live with wealthy acquaintances who give them the illusion of being a part of the family, but never quite let them forget that they are, as an old Hindi film writer would say, ‘sautela’.
Alia Bhatt in a still from Jigra.
On a work trip to a fictional Southeast Asian country, Ankur is coerced into taking the fall for his best friend after the police discover drugs in their car. They obviously weren’t his. But as with so many countries in that region, drug offences in this fictional land are punishable by death. Ankur is swiftly put on trial, convicted, and sentenced to the electric chair. He is shipped off to a high security island prison off the coast, where he is tortured both mentally and physically by the evil warden, played by an outstanding Vivek Gomber. The warden’s tongue-in-cheek name — he’s called Hansraj Landa — should give you an idea of the kind of person that he is. Poor Ankur, played by the fresh-faced Vedang Raina, stands no chance.
It’s one thing for Satya to look directly into his eyes and promise him that she will get him out of there, but it’s a different thing altogether for Ankur and the audience to believe her. Because, why should we? “Tu meri protection mein hai,” she says, abruptly ending a stretch of deeply emotional drama after seemingly being possessed by the spirit of Liam Neeson. She could just be putting on a brave face for her brother, and perhaps a part of her actually is. She’d already exhausted the legal options, and bribery seems out of the question. But we believe Satya when she drunkenly declares her intention to break him out of prison because Bala has introduced these people to us as characters first and plot devices later. It seems like a basic thing to do, but you’d be surprised how few Hindi filmmakers actually give a damn about stuff like this.
Forget inviting us to spend time with the characters we’re supposed to care about, most Hindi movies wouldn’t even think that this is a crucial dramatic requirement in the first place. Watching Satya and Ankur’s complicated dynamic unfold via a friendly basketball game in an early scene communicates more about them than reams of dialogue would’ve. Bala also makes the smart decision to not dillydally after Ankur is fed to the wolves by their adoptive family. A lesser film would’ve mined this development for some hardcore audience manipulation. But wasting time ranting against them would be antithetical to who Satya is as a person. She eviscerates them from her mind the moment she leaves India, as does the movie. After a bit of revenge, of course.
Bhatt, the best living Indian actor of her, or any other generation, plays Satya like someone who has invested her life savings in an expensive flight ticket, but is stuck in the check-in queue 30 minutes before take-off. The airline knows she’s there, officials who can probably help her know she’s there; she can probably even see the aircraft on the tarmac. She’s being fed constant updates about its departure. Despite all this, she knows that the chances of her getting on it are slim. But only Nagraj Manjule could turn a moment this commonplace into something soaringly cinematic. Jigra, however, is already a super-stylised film — actual lives are at stake. Bala gives himself plenty of opportunity to launch into explanations about the dense escape plan that Satya concocts alongside the retired gangster Mr Bhatia, played by Manoj Pahwa in his second scene-stealing performance of the year, and a retired police officer named Muthu, played by Rahul Ravindran, lah. But he always returns to the emotional core of this story. The ‘interval block’, as the trade analysts who’ve been blacklisted by Dharma would probably call it, ends with a flashback of Satya and Ankur playing around as children, and not some major action sequence.
Alia Bhatt in a still from Vasan Bala’s Jigra.
And this is because Bala cuts the film to emotion, not plot. The reason why the film’s resounding climax works — not the jailbreak, which is excellent as well, but the boat chase — is because of all the character-based ground work that he has done. As they flee from the prison in the film’s final moments, Satya is fully prepared to sacrifice her life to protect Ankur. This was always on the table, especially in the preceding escape sequence. But the possibility of Satya dying only truly rears its head on that boat, when she mirrors a gesture from her childhood and shields him from the mad villain’s gunfire. It’s a remarkable moment, because this is when you realise how tremendously sad you’re going to be if she dies. Ankur is safe; you knew he was going to be safe from the moment Raina gave that proud I-told-you-so smile on the rooftop of the prison. He was under Satya’s protection. But who was protecting her?
What you’re likely going through in these tense moments is what Satya had been experiencing for the entire duration of the film. We believed her when she declared that no harm will come to Ankur not because she simply said it, but because Bala inserted a tender moment when they touched fingertips through a hole in the windowpane between them. It cemented her bond not only with Ankur, but also with us; notice that Bala has Satya look directly into our eyes in this scene. We’re witnessing a movie executed at the highest level; Jigra is intricately written, has an actual musical score, and despite its long-ish run-time, is paced like a bullet. Each of its montages are cut to perfection, but there is an indescribable rhythm to the rest of the film as well.
Ankur was thrown under the bus, but one would hope that Dharma doesn’t push Bala into moving traffic by deploying that old ‘audience-is-always-right’ rhetoric. If only there was an age-old practice in place where excellent films could be shown to discerning audiences who have the ability to spread the good word. Wouldn’t that be a better alternative to unleashing it in the wild and leaving it at the mercy of easily manipulated crowds who aren’t ethically obligated to ignore their biases? Ah, well.
Post Credits Scene is a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters. Because there’s always something to fixate about once the dust has settled.
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