When Mahesh Manjrekar began his assembly-line production of 'movies with a purpose' following the phenomenal success of Vaastav, one expected a rebirth of the middle-of-the-road cinema—the kind once represented by Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Gulzar and the early J.P. Dutta.
But if films like Astitva and Kurukshetra were hiccups in that journey, Pitaah is, without doubt, a virtual mishap. To say the least, Pitaah is a case study in how directors of calibre lose their touch when they sacrifice good story-telling skills in favour of projecting action and the star at their disposal.
Pitaah takes you back to a lost era of Hindi films—the period of evil thakurs and rebellious peasants—which saw the making of some great Dharmendra, Amitabh Bachchan movies in the past. A little conscientiousness and sensitivity towards film history might have led Manjrekar to pay homage to a genre. Instead, he offers a caricature which distorts the fresh elements of the story—the rape of a minor and the total surrender of all levers of middle-class society to wealth and power.
The distortion comes in various forms, most glaringly in the dwarfing and emasculation of the main villain, the thakur. A man who rules the village, and is wily enough to bend every rule to his benefit, never emerges as a mean, colourful character. Om Puri's portrayal is full of brilliant touches but the actor seems listless and laid back. Worse, his scenes are directed with haste and imprecision—they are also edited in a baffling and sloppy manner. Then the narrative, especially after the major turning point, goes haywire—there is no sense of sequencing or a logical build-up of situations and motives.
Sanjay Dutt, a mute bonded labour till his daughter is raped, suddenly decides to take revenge at the insistence of Nandita Das, his wife. This saga is played out without the kind of attention to detail and sequencing one normally finds in a Hindi film action scene. Characters change their spots inexplicably, turning into good fellas from helpers of evil. The problem rests in Manjrekar's approach to action. Vaastav's gore had a hardboiled, realistic edge, which came from a strict adherence to the logic of revenge. Manjerakar tries going big and illogical in the manner of a regular Sanjay Dutt thriller and fails because he is too 'middle of the road' to present fallacious action with conviction.
The apparent victim of the screw-up, of course, is the rape issue, which gets obfuscated. Performance wise, Nandita Das fails to deliver. This is also Sanjay Dutt's least-commendable film—the guy who had begun to act after Vaastav passes by almost without a hard-hitting presence.
