Jazbaa ***
Dir: Sanjay Gupta.
With: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Irrfan Khan, Shabana Azmi, Jackie Shroff. 119
mins. Cert: 12A
As Bollywood royalty,
Aishwarya Rai Bachchan would have been forgiven for easing herself back in upon
her return from maternity leave. It’s to her credit, then, that she’s instead
taken on Jazbaa, an appreciably
pulpy remake of the 2007 Korean thriller Seven
Days. Granted, Hindi cinema’s usual maternal-love fetish is somewhere
hereabouts, but it’s secondary to a recurring Korean concern: what happens when
those with dirty hands let those they care about slip through greasy fingers.
Every one of its characters – from the highest MP to the lowliest thug – is
working the system; an end-credit card highlighting Indian rape stats
repositions Sanjay Gupta’s film as a critique of a system that needs to work
harder itself.
One of Mumbai’s
craftiest defence lawyers, La Bachchan’s Anu Verma is introduced engineering
the disappearance of crucial evidence at a mobster’s extortion trial. Her shaky
ethical code will be tested shortly thereafter when her young daughter is
kidnapped by a gang who dispatch her to do their bidding – by getting one of
their number, recently convicted of raping and murdering a student, off Death
Row. Given that her latest client tries throttling her at their first meeting,
accepting said appeal appears an obvious wrong turn – but then the law, in this
conception, is a labyrinthine grey zone in which even those trying to do right
will incur not inconsiderable collateral damage.
There’s a certain
clumsiness in setting all this up. Certain early scenes look very much as
though they were drawn up solely so its producer-star can show off what
supermarket-checkout magazines would describe as her toned post-baby figure: a
spot of downward-dog on a harbour wall under the credits, running a poised
relay leg at her daughter’s school sports day. Though Rai Bachchan proves a
fierce courtroom presence, her agony at seeing her offspring spirited away is
decidedly overstretched: witness her extended pre-intermission slo-mo charge
towards the kidnappers’ SUV after her girl is spied in the backseat. (The relay
suggests she’d have made it at normal speed.)
Gupta’s more assured
around Anu’s sidekick Inspector Yohaan (Irrfan Khan), recently suspended but
insistent that, in the scheme of things, he’s not so corrupt: as he points out,
his going rate was 1.5 crores, where the average is ten. You accept, as you
would in a well-penned airport novel, that he happens to have been Anu’s
childhood friend; also that he’s been crushing on our heroine. Khan’s signature
subtlety isn’t much required, but this chewy character part affords him
countless gruffly louche flourishes: to one suspect’s pleas for justice, the
Inspector snickers “You’ve been watching too much Hollywood; this is
Bollywood”, before smashing a chair over the unfortunate.
Visually, it’s
overwrought: all torrential downpours and yellowy-green filters the colour of
nausea. Yet the byplay between Anu and the dead student’s mother is bolstered
by Shabana Azmi’s commanding presence in the latter role; your sympathies do
swing back-and-forth. And it’s a nicely ambivalent touch that the matter is
resolved only as a result of an underworld powerplay; the moral, not so far
removed from the moral of a show like House
of Cards, is you make your deals where you can. For all the rot Gupta
dwells upon, there’s something refreshing about Jazbaa within the wider Bollywood context: it’ll make for brisk,
pacy, adult entertainment – whichever side of the law you’re on.
Jazbaa is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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