Review: Drishyam (2015)

Since I got pregnant with my son, I have not watched a movie in a cinema theater. During pregnancy I did not want to expose the fetus to loud sound and after he was born there is not enough time, given how limited leisure time one gets with baby, home and work. Plus one of us has to babysit and watching a movie alone in a theater is really not too much fun.  This, however, does not mean that I do not watch movies. I watch an occasional Hollywood or Bollywood movie on Netflix or Amazon Prime Video.

In recent months, finding a Bollywood movie on these platforms has been a little difficult. On 10^th January 2019, ‘young Bollywood actors,’ (as conscientious-less media declared, although I have more appropriate labels for them, and what qualifies as ‘young’?), met Prime Minister elect, Narender Modi in Delhi. The selfie that did the rounds afterwards was a fantastic record of who all was at that meeting. I am grateful to worldwide web that in seconds it reached far and wide and shared numerous times so that in years to come none of these sickening opportunists can wriggle themselves out of their culpability. Almost exactly a year earlier, on 18^th January, 2018, another group of actors, producers and directors had fallen to similar deplorable depths when they had posed for a selfie with Prime Minister elect Benjamin Netanyahu who was visiting India at the time. Both these men have certified blood of thousands of human beings on their hands. They have, in the past, and continue to incite and perpetuate hate and violence, through state machinery, against defenseless people. Here again we had another evidence that can be filed under how bottomless greed of the rich and the resourceful can blind them to distinction between right and wrong. And even if we have no record of any one of these participating at these events with the same degree of crimes against humanity that these two men are proven to have committed, their silence and validation through their attendance, makes them equally culpable.

This, poses a little bit of a problem for me in terms of limiting the choices that I have left when selecting a movie. Obviously, none of these individuals can feature in the credits in what movie I select to watch. Discarding the people from the first selfie with Netanyahu is quite easy. They do not produce the kind of work I like to watch anyway except Imtiaz Ali. But it was still not a great loss. The second selfie posed a bit of a problem as some of these actors have risen from doing independent cinema and I had expected a little bit more spine from them then the likes of Karan Johar. So this weekend we ended up watching Drishyam (2015). It had Tabu, an actor I admire and Ajay Devgan, an actor I’m not too keen about. But, my dinner was getting cold and after a long day, I wanted to stop searching and start watching.

The movie was not too bad. There was sufficient amount of suspense and a spine of a story holding everything together. My issue with the movie was the staleness of the script. The script was stuck in the 80’s.

The story is about a man who has a wife and two daughters. For extra effect, the older of the two daughters is said to be adopted. The human agency in the movie is only afforded to men, even Tabu, who is introduced as a formidable IG of police is only responding to situations and not in control of any part of how the story unfolds. Ajay Devgan holds the reins of the movie. Although such high handedness with a movie script is not ideal and one hopes for nuance, but sometimes when watching mainstream, commercial Bollywood movies one parks expectations and class. What I had not bargained for was completely skewed understanding and presentation of the critical plot. 
The older daughter who is a teenager goes to a youth camp. A boy there is caught taking videos of girls and is told off when one of the girls in the youth camp reports him. The girl, Anju, returns back to her small town and life moves on albeit at a very slow pace. One day while the girl is out to buy some groceries, she bumps into the boy, Sam. He shows her a video he has taken of her at the summer camp while she is taking a shower. He blackmails her and tells her to meet him behind her house that night. She is petrified. When Sam comes to meet her in the outhouse, he also finds her mother. They beg him to delete the video and spare them the humiliation. Seeing the situation, he proposes that he would delete the video if the mother slept with him. While he is talking to the mother huddled in a corner, the daughter sees a rod and aims at his hand which is holding the phone but misfires and hits him on the head and he dies on the spot. Not only does the rod miss the hand, after the point, the movie completely misses the plot. Throughout the movie, the shame of this incident is placed squarely on Anju. It is she who is apologizing to her parents and at no point in the movie is the shame transferred to where it actually belongs, with Sam. As investigation starts we find that Sam was Tabu’s character’s son. In the middle of the investigation when Anju’s family, including her 5 year old sister are being harassed and beaten by the police on Tabu’s character’s instruction she finds out that her son was blackmailing Anju. There is, however, no remorse or even a single dialogue owning this shame. The narrative of the movie takes for granted that the girl and her family are the ones who should suffer shame. This is a movie that was presented with an opportunity to give a very strong message about how a family should confront such a situation. The suspense in the story could still have been left intact and very little maneuvering would’ve been required to include this angle. The loss of this angle is phenomenal. The message that this movie is sending out to masses is that a girl or family or such a girl finding themselves in such a situation should either kill the perpetrator or the girl should commit suicide.

The movie released in 2015, three years after a very famous 2012 incident in Delhi, when a young woman was gang raped in a moving bus and left to die on the roadside, she eventually succumbed to her injuries which included a penetration of a metal rod damaging her intestines, ovaries and uterus. Eventually the accused were all convicted but it is sad to see that this incident did not bring about a shift in the mind-set of how such incidents need to be studied or presented.