Meghna Gulzar might have made her directorial debut in 2002 with Filhaal...but she is best known for her later works, such as Talvar and Raazi. The former, especially, sits like a crown atop her filmography, as no other Meghna Gulzar film is as remarkable as that crime thriller released in 2015. But even Gulzar's best film doesn't fully belong to her, given that the most striking thing about Talvar was its writing. It's Vishal Bhardwaj who deserves most of the credit for what makes the film remarkable. The subtle observations he brought to the police procedural, superbly dramatized by a group of terrific actors, are the not-so-secret recipe behind the movie's success. That isn't to deny Gulzar's contribution to Talvar, but the film's most memorable achievement lies elsewhere.
Because as a director, as a creator of images, Gulzar is quite plain and unimaginative. She has not yet developed a personal aesthetic that distinguishes her images as something arising from the deep corners of her artistic mind. Hell, there is nothing "artistic" about the visuals you see on the screen. The conventional images generate an effect along the lines of a pseudo-documentary, which is why the best scenes in Daayra feature characters casually chatting or living as they have been for a long time.
A cop jokes that since his colleague has been married to a caterer, they won't have to spend money on a catering service for her wedding party. One of the colleagues of DCP Ajooni Kohli (Kareena Kapoor Khan), inside an expensive-looking hospital, wonders how much money the staff must be charging for their services. In one scene, DCP Raman Kumar (Prithviraj Sukumaran) and his colleagues sit in his office and eat the food brought by his wife (Anuja Sathe). In another, Ajooni looks at a not-so-well-maintained guest house and simply smiles because she is used to being treated as somewhat inferior for heading an SIT team that investigates the actions of her own colleagues. These moments establish a sense of camaraderie and history, and they work better than the pseudo-intellectual porn Gulzar throws on the screen in the form of a crucial yet barely developed question: "Is the instant gratification of a police encounter superior to the slow-moving wheels of justice?"
A criminal—in this case, a rapist—can be put through a long and tedious judicial process, and even then, he can escape punishment on medical grounds or something similar. A minor found guilty of rape in a Delhi case, after all, gets to remain under juvenile protection in the film.
It's a tricky terrain full of ethically complex arguments and grey areas, but Gulzar flattens them all into a simplistic back-and-forth conversation between Raman and Ajooni. Both sides make basic points that emerge less in the form of an impassioned debate than as small breadcrumbs for the audience to chew on and discuss in the lobby after the screening. It's clear that Gulzar leans more towards the justice that comes instantaneously through police killings because she never allows the other side—the courts—to make its points compellingly. When we learn that Ajooni's father was shot outside the premises of the court and that it took 14 years to bring his killer to justice, I don't think many in the audience will clap for the judiciary. On the other hand, the scene where the rapists are shot by the police is filmed with such drama and a feeling of catharsis that it is likely to leave audiences cheering for more encounters and immediate relief. For all its apparent suggestions of batting for both sides, Daayra only roots for one form of justice. Gulzar only pretends to be level-headed. Her ideas are one-sided, narrow, simple, and thin.
Gulzar also fails to provide the victim, Ragini (Pragati Mishra), with a social circle, a distinctive personality, or interests of her own. We are not even told what job she does or which company she works for. For this director, Ragini merely becomes a case study-cum-catalyst to open the doors for armchair intellectual thinking. The main substance of Daayra is the conversation between Raman and Ajooni—it captures the entire reason for the existence of this film. Alas, it isn't enough to hide the stench of impoverished creativity.
To understand more clearly what's missing from Daayra, lay it alongside Anubhav Sinha's Assi. Sinha used sexual assault as a platform from which he turned his gaze towards the society around it—its rituals, its casual misogynistic talk, its misplaced notions of justice, and its celebration of lewd music. Sinha's lens rotated 360 degrees to encompass everything in sight. At the same time, he advanced his filmmaking with an ingenious fourth-wall-breaking aesthetic that mourned rape, condemned the rapists, and acknowledged its own shortcomings in changing society within the film's running time. The red screen, with its 20-minute alarm, occasionally reminded us that another rape had occurred in the time we had been watching the movie.
Gulzar, by contrast, exhibits no invention, no evolution, no zeal to develop as both a thinker and an artist. She continues to run in her same old circle of mediocrity. Even as intellectual porn, Daayra is far from enticing. All it has is an intriguing one-line idea, padded with a lot of empty noise. Daayra is a waste of its potential. All it can do is try to score brownie points.
Final Score - [3/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
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Publisher at Midgard Times