Even Alia Bhatt can’t save Vasan Bala’s Jigra, which adamantly sticks to style over substance | Bollywood

Prison break films are more than just survival stories. They are a reminder of the strict and brutal system that individuals go through. It has all the formulas for the great escape, including a daring plan to escape the maximum security prison and the execution of that plan itself. Once you know the premise, it’s not difficult to predict what lies ahead and how things might end for our protagonists. (Also read: Where is Hanshi Dao, the land in Alia Bhatt’s Jigra, where people are imprisoned for crying, or killed for drug trafficking?)

Vasan Bala’s Jigra, which hit theaters last Friday, attempts the template for a prison break film with mixed results. It’s a classic example of style over substance, when a film chews more than it can chew. Here, Satya (Alia Bhatt) must free her brother Ankur (Vedang Raina) from a foreign prison where he is on death row. Unfortunately, the prison in Jigra is not located in a specific location in real life. So the creators come up with a whole fictional country of Hanshi Dao, where the punishment for drug trafficking is death. Ankur has three months before the death by electrocution order is handed down, so Satya must act immediately.

What works for Jigra

As simple as Jigra portrays itself at first glance, Vasan Bala cleverly plays with the template to add elements of intrigue and suspense. Jigra does the right thing by making this escape attempt more difficult. This is because not only does Satya plan a well-thought-out escape with the help of ex-gangster Bhatia (Manoj Pahwa) and Indian-origin retired police officer Muthu (Rahul Ravindran), but Ankur’s own plan lies within the walls. of the prison. Satya says to Ankur during their conversation, “Ulti ginti shuru kar de (Start counting backwards).” To which he replies, ‘Shuru kar di (I have already started)!’ Both Satya and Ankur’s plan involves an escape through a tunnel, even though neither decides to inform the other. Will both their plans reach a middle ground?

As Jigra raises this question, the viewers race ahead of the film a few steps to resolve the complication. It adds a dependency on the film’s rhythm, a kind of investment in these two separate journeys, with neither Satya nor Ankur knowing what the other is up to. In balancing these threads, Bala gets immense support from his lead actress Alia Bhatt and the music (as well as the background score) by Achint Thakkar. The music is the real force that drives the film forward with a thumping feeling. Then there is Alia Bhatt’s portrayal of Satya, whose desperation and fear form Jigra’s bruised heart. She is a smart and alert listener who should not show any weakness as she primarily operates from a place of reserve and control. Even when she is told that her worst nightmare has come true, her Satya does not burst into tears. The suppressed anger is a much-needed texture to the film that eschews any form of anger from its template.

What doesn’t work

This absence of this anger is consistently baffling for a film like Jigra, which is in dialogue with the brand of Bollywood films released in the 1970s starring Amitabh Bachchan. In an early scene Satya is told: “Arre, Bachchan nahin banna hai. Bach is nikalna hai.” In response, she says: “Ab toh Bachchan hello banna hai.” There’s a lot of style, not a lot of heart. Here Satya is the angry young woman in charge, who will settle for nothing less than protecting her lover. Even as Bhatt brings inner turmoil and a body language so coiled it seems to explode, Jigra barely does enough to match that intensity. It’s not enough daring.

The biggest concern here is that Jigra rushes through the initial sections when the audience is first introduced to Satya. Her character hardly leaves the fulcrum of her hometown, and we view her as a passive character who exists in relation to the other members of the family. The only time she lets her guard down is when she challenges her brother to a basketball game. But that doesn’t help reveal anything about their shared bond, or how the trauma of watching their father die by suicide has shaped them as people.

Jigra returns to that incident again and again, without any concern for the characters. We hardly know them as people; first as the son and daughter of that single parent who took his life, and then as siblings who had to grow up together with the trauma of witnessing that horrific incident. The point here is not what the film wants to be, but what it is. The bond between Satya and Ankur is heavily endorsed. Satya’s angry young woman is not angry enough to water any anti-establishment seeds, even though she is in another country. So when she lets out a cry of long live the revolution, what law and order is she talking about? Where has the need for the disenfranchised been until now? Jigra lacks any introspection of the socio-political turmoil that plagues and surrounds the characters. They seem to operate in a kind of vacuum, without any illusion of the anger or frustration of a generation as a whole.

Jigra doesn’t seem to know his heartbeat. It lacks the courage to push buttons that it so desperately wants to celebrate in the main character. Jigra is a film that tries to be different just for the sake of saying so is different. The slow-motion shots look tacky instead of compelling, and the stylized placement of a Zanjeer song is a tad too indulgent. Bala’s cinephilia gets the worst hat-tip yet in his filmography when the convicts are named John Woo, Kim Ki-duk and Wong Kar-wai.

Bala wants us to focus on the execution of the escape attempt(s), but also makes a mess of it with too many plot holes for viewers to not notice. What’s worse is that Jigra operates with a kind of superiority complex, with a forced revelry in introducing more roadblocks on the way to his characters. What Jigra does not realize is that in a film based on intrigue, the viewer always takes two steps forward to calculate how this could turn out. Satya is as confused as we, the viewer, as the stakes continue to rise in the final part of the film. The action isn’t inventive and the chaos that ensues in these scenes makes it more clumsy.

A film is more than just a sum of its parts. Ultimately, it must have some kind of dialogue with its social context. With Jigra you can lock those expectations in jail. Jigra certainly looks lost when there are no connecting threads to pin down the emotional register. The film’s insistence on suspense just for suspense’s sake is its biggest disappointment. Bhatt can hardly save this ship by being at the front and taking charge. She has the jigrabut not her film.

Jigra is now showing in cinemas throughout the country.

This is The Fault in Our Films, in which Santanu Das writes about a critically acclaimed film/series and what keeps the ‘good’ from becoming ‘great’.