JAIL

Madhur Bhandarkar has made a name for himself as a realist filmmaker (this and that he has won 3 national awards always precede a piece on him). His films like Page 3 and Fashion broke the art film-commercial film barrier for him. Bhandarkar has comfortably placed himself as a ‘mainstream-realist’ filmmaker. After documenting the lives of bar-girls, corporates, the fashion fraternity and page3 people, he turns his camera on life in a prison or jail.

Jail is about the travails of a falsely implicated young man Parag Dixit played by Neil Nitin Mukesh. Through his story the film attempts to throw open a kind of life that most of us will know only through newspapers or films that have dealt with it. This film reinforces ideas we may already have of the overcrowded living conditions of Indian jails and the inhumanity imposed on the inmates who, not only put up with a lack of proper sanitation and food but also fight to survive the alternative system of unspoken rules imposed through connivance of imprisoned criminals and jail authorities. The dehumanizing physical examination of the protagonist in the very first sequence indicates a gritty portrayal of life in the prison. What follows is sometimes moving, but seldom very illuminating.

There is a hiccup in the beginning that grows only bigger and undermines the narrative integrity of the film – this is the constant shifting of narrative axis. In the beginning it seems one will experience the Jail-world with our declared protagonist, Parag Dixit. However soon enough, Nawab’s (Manoj Bajpai) voice-over is introduced which now points to a possibility of a second person narrative commentary. The two “voices” only get tangled as the film progresses. Furthermore, to deal with stories of other characters, the film assumes an omniscient narrative voice. Constant shifts like these, done without much care or purpose, confuse the audience and chip away at the flow of the story.

The story bit too has its share of problems. The crime that Parag Dixit is accused of and lands him in Jail is flimsy. Even if the charge of drug-peddling is serious, there are clear evidences that will speak in his favour and one wonders why it takes so long for him to get them out to the court (a stronger case-building ‘worked backwards’ in the narrative would have made this story more believable). Parag’s inability to utter a single word in his defense can be understood in the beginning as mark of confusion at the quick turn of events, but it soon gets irritating to see an educated man, intelligent enough to be doing well in his career, whimpering inarticulate half-words. Essentially, the protagonist story has only two plot points – his getting in the Jail and his getting out – between the two is a middle that is stretched so thin, it’s nearly invisible.

The plot of Jail is unlayered and uncomplicated. In this, Jail is much like other Madhur Bhandarkar films. Whether it’s Corporate or Fashion he keeps the stories and plots simple and relies on exposes to get the audience hooked. Placing fictitious characters who the audience can indemnify with in factual, thorny worlds has worked well in films like Chandni Bar and Page3. Except in Jail, Bhandarkar takes plain documentation far too seriously, so a good part of the film is squandered in introducing stock characters who neither have a role in the story, nor add any layers to it. This exercise seems all the more pointless because there is no originality in the characters – a cricket bookie, a neta, a cheat, a man who murders for his wife’s honour, an underworld bhai who conducts his business from the prison, and a mandatory gay pair – and all of them talk and behave as you would expect them to (from films you have watched earlier). For long periods nothing happens, you just watch the inmates eating, bathing and washing their clothes. Or worse, you see hordes of them amble aimlessly to provide the ‘passing’ crowd to our main characters who do nothing much either.

Unlike Page3 or Fashion, the director avoids getting his hands dirty. Are crowded cells, bad food and washing your own clothes the biggest issues for a regular inmate? Here there are underworld bhais but they mostly leave the people alone and deal with only those who go asking for help. This jail seems more democratic than the world outside and nobody bothers anybody unnecessarily. The inmates are all nice people (except one Joe D’Souza), victims of circumstances who seem to be having a fairly good time playing carom, telling fortunes and reciting bad poetry!

Neil Nitin Mukesh does a fair job. Manoj Bajpai starts well and would have given the audience something to talk about, but the script fails him. Starting as the sane voice in the prison mayhem he turns into some kind of moral police towards the end (a Bhandarkar trademark by now). He appears at Parag’s side, much like a guardian angel, every time Parag is tempted to go against the authorities. For good or worse, Bajpai character ends up like a mouthpiece of the establishment. Mugdha Godse looks attractive and does the needful. The surprise of the pack is Arya Babbar who comes up with a decent performance. The two odd songs in the film are regrettable.

Realist cinema is valued because it chooses relevant themes, shows us the world we live in and is thought-provoking. One cannot use the style without purpose and justify it as realist cinema. Bhandarkar’s Jail is a faded tapestry of characters, location and situations that hang about aimlessly without striking any real conversation among themselves or with us.