Drishyam ***
Dir: Nishikant Kamat.
With: Ajay Devgn, Shriya Saran, Tabu, Rajat Kapoor. 163 mins. Cert: 12A
Some may decry the
news that the Fantastic Four
franchise has been rebooted after a decade. Drishyam marks the Indian cinema’s second crack this summer at its
own material: Jeethu Joseph’s 2013 Malayalam thriller of this name, remade
first in Tamil (July’s Papanasam,
again directed by Joseph) and now in Hindi by writer Upendra Sidhaye and
director Nishikant Kamat. The temptation is to ascribe such speedy recycling to
commercial imperatives – in theory, Hindi grants the story its biggest audience
– but even on its third spin, this story still feels fresh, urgent and relevant
to a moment when we’re surrounded by screens.
Kamat’s version
restages Joseph’s morality play – village cable-TV employee uses procedural
knowledge to clean up after his teenage daughter kills a punk wielding candid
footage of her – with an ungainly subtitle (“Visuals Can Be Deceptive”) and a
brisker, darker tone. At 163 minutes, this Drishyam
hardly cuts to the chase, but it’s a dash more economic in describing its
threatened family unit. Where we relaxed into the company of Papanasam’s real-life partners Kamal
Haasan and Gautami, Kamat’s film feels decidedly punched-up: lead Ajay Devgn
has thirteen years on his onscreen wife Shriya Saran, who barely appears older
than her eldest child.
Given the
revenge-porn backdrop, it makes vague thematic sense that the women should so
recall sisters in looks as in arms, but replacing the amenable Haasan with the
brooding, muscular Devgn has a peculiar effect. The latter certainly displays
the heavy-lidded look of one who’s had to sift through endless bad movies for
crumbs of wisdom – it’s a look many critics will recognise from the bathroom
mirror – but he’ll be few viewers’ idea of a cuddly paterfamilias. Sniping
passive-aggressively at Saran, “playfully” holding a carrot to her neck as if
it were a knife, Devgn reinterprets Joseph’s everyman hero as a borderline
brute.
Rather than sinking
the film as entertainment, this actually lends the second half a new dynamic:
it renders the protagonist almost as compromised as the brutish local cops.
Casting Bollywood figurehead Tabu as the Inspector General on Devgn’s case
ensures our sympathies are conflicted, to say the least; the concluding gesture
towards moral relativism consequently feels far queasier here than it was in Papanasam, which permitted us to hope
Haasan would, this once, get away with murder. (Devgn’s Vijay appears to treat
corpse disposal like gardening: as a regular weekend activity.)
Kamat proves a keen
observer of how this household, with its elegant partition curtains, is sullied
by the sudden lapse into murderous activity: the mud tracked through the
hallway, the youngest daughter in her Minnie Mouse pyjamas catching a glimpse
of the body. Removed of Haasan’s blithe humour and Joseph’s lush pastoral
imagery, this Drishyam presents a
grim vision of rural India as a place where everyone has crossed a line and
seen too much, and policemen have no apparent qualms about taking the jackboot
to an eight-year-old child.
For all that, it
remains a pleasurable, twisty tale. Kamat has wisely retained all of Joseph’s
satisfying thriller business – again, there’s an agonising wait for a bright
yellow Hyundai to sink as a potential witness hovers on the horizon – and
revisiting this narrative allows us to spot the slyness of its construction:
how those components essential to the second half – the remote quarry, the new
police station – are slipped in beneath the guise of genial scenesetting, and
just how meticulously the eventual cover-up is worked out, right down to such
details as who sits where on a bus.
It’s true Sidhaye’s
script adds nothing radically new to earlier drafts, and even at the notionally
pacier length, you can still feel it bogging down in interrogatory talk towards
the end. First-time viewers may well conclude, however, that plotting this
strong doesn’t require that much more to play on a Friday or Saturday night.
What you get here, and again it does just about feel enough, is a largely
functional, occasionally deft entertainment, drawn from a story you suspect the
movies will probably be riffing on until The Great Unplug of 2028.
Drishyam is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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