Her smile, His eyes, and a Question Meghna Gulzar has not answered...
By Seema Dhawan Photography-Shazid Chauhan
Rating: 4 / 5
I walked into Daayra knowing almost nothing about it, and I wish I could watch more films that way. At PVR Chanakyapuri in New Delhi the media screening came first and the press conference after, which meant nobody had explained a single scene to us or told us why an actor had said yes to the film. So when Kareena Kapoor Khan, Prithviraj Sukumaran and Meghna Gulzar finally sat down to take questions, we had the film fresh in our heads and plenty to ask.
It begins with a celebration. DCP Raman Kumar (Prithviraj Sukumaran) and his team have shot dead four men accused of raping and murdering a young woman, and people are hailing them as heroes. Then Meghna rewinds to show us how we got here, and this was the portion that hit me hardest.Ragini Pujari (Pragati Mishra) doesn’t come home. Her mother Parvati (Kshitee Jog) and brother Kabir (Bhavesh Babbani) go to the police, and I have to say the police station scene is as real as anything I have seen in a Hindi film in a long while. The FIR is not taken. The family gets useless questions instead, and assumptions about their own daughter, as though a girl who goes missing must have done something to invite it. We have all heard stories like this, and some of us have lived them. Kshitee Jog doesn’t raise the pitch even once, and her restraint is the reason the scene moved me as much as it did.
The whole film rests on that scene, because whatever Raman does later comes out of this failure. By the next day Ragini’s burnt body has been found, the media has picked up the case, and the same police force that couldn’t be bothered to write down a complaint now has to show results.Raman gets the case, and four men are picked up within days. What follows is the scene everyone will talk about. He takes them to the very spot where Ragini was killed and shoots them dead there. Meghna keeps going back to his eyes while it happens, and you understand that he isn’t really looking at the four men. He is seeing the girl, and what was done to her on that same ground. Prithviraj has always been an actor who talks with his eyes, and what is in them here is rage. It is a quiet, held-in rage, and it scared me more than any amount of shouting would have. I’ll admit something. Sitting in that hall, I wasn’t thinking about courts or due process. I was with him.
The film turns around right there. Doubts are raised about whether the encounter was genuine, a special investigation team is set up, and DCP Ajooni Kohli (Kareena Kapoor Khan) is put in charge of it. Ajooni’s view is that the police have to work within the law, however slow that law may be. Raman’s view is that sometimes the law is simply not enough. The two of them hardly share the screen, and yet the second half plays like one long argument between them. Meghna, to her credit, never pushes you towards either side.
If Prithviraj does it with his eyes, Kareena does it with her smile. It keeps changing through the film, and quite often it tells you what Ajooni is thinking before she opens her mouth. She doesn’t try to make the character bigger than she is. Ajooni has her beliefs and she has her limits, and Kareena seems to know exactly which scenes need more from her and which need her to pull back. In a few places the smile says everything,
Meghna’s direction is the reason all of this holds together. She doesn’t go for melodrama anywhere, not at the police station and not even in the encounter, which she shoots like something ugly that actually happened and not like an action set piece. Saurabh Goswami’s camera stays close to faces and keeps the frames plain and lived-in, which suits a story like this far more than gloss would have. The dialogues sound like the way people really talk in police stations and in homes, without lines written for claps. There are no songs at all, and I didn’t miss them. Ketan Sodha’s background score does its work quietly and knows when to stay out of the way.
You might feel the pace dips in the second half. Once the investigation takes over, the film becomes more about procedure and conversation, and it doesn’t move the way the first hour does. It never bored me, though. By then I was too caught up in where the argument between the two officers was heading, and a subject like this deserves a little patience from us
At the press conference, Kareena said that after 25 years in this profession an actor needs challenges. She has done different shades before, she said, in films like Talaash, and this character had to have one more. She also said she feels Ajooni will always be remembered. I had seen the film just before, and I couldn’t disagree. About Meghna she was openly affectionate. Daayra was a script she could never have refused, she is always “greedy” to work with her, and she feels there are very few directors in the industry who can really bring a performance out of an actor. Normally I would file that under promotional talk. That day it just sounded accurate.
Then came the question I had been waiting for. Which side would the three of them take in real life? All of them said more or less the same thing, that it depends on the situation. Prithviraj explained it best, and he did it through the two characters. If the crime is done to someone you know, someone close to you, he said, you would want what Raman wants, which is justice there and then. If it happens to a person you have never met, you would probably think the way Ajooni does and say let the law take its course. Kareena leaned towards the legal system. Meghna pointed out that the film itself ends on a question, and said she wants the audience to find the answer for themselves.
For me, Prithviraj’s was the most honest answer of the day, and the film had already proved it on me. I had watched Parvati being turned away from that police station. I had watched the encounter and felt no objection to it. And I am someone who would tell you, if you asked, that I believe in the courts.So Meghna has handed the question over to us. I came out of Chanakyapuri still arguing with myself about it, and I am not done yet.
