Starring: Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgan, Kareena Kapoor, Manoj Bajpai, Arjun Rampal
Directed by Prakash Jha
Rating: **
There are some films that take you by surprise with their sheer elegance or their audacity, force you to go into raptures over the brilliance of craft and content. There are others that leave you trashing and mourning the lack of cinematic artistry. Then there are those that elicit no passionate response. You watch them impassively and forget them soon after. Prakash Jha’s Satyagraha is one such film. It just leaves you cold and aloof.
The resemblance, or not, to the Anna Hazare-led Jan Lokpal bill andolan is not the real issue. What matters is how compellingly it fictionalises and presents a contemporary mass movement on screen. It was a movement incessantly brought home to us by 24-hour news channels. That real-life drama and fire goes totally amiss on screen. For the most part, Satyagraha makes for tedious, wearying viewing. The reason is that Jha’s cinema is getting fixed in a monotonous blueprint. Be it a Rajneeti, Aarakshan or a Satyagraha, the outline is similar, the characters seem as though they have just shifted from the frames of one film on to another. What adds to the deja vu is that some actors have also been the same. Film after film. So an actor as consummate as Manoj Bajpai ends up playing the politician villain here with an identical amount of hamming and flaring of nostrils as he did in the role of the avaricious coaching-class businessman in Aarakshan. Very little separates the two characters.
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Bachchan plays the on-screen equivalent of Anna Hazare. He who takes on the system when he loses his own young son to it. The world joins him through Twitter (the most screen time that the social networking site has got till now) and hashtag revolutions unspooling on fancy tablets. Coming to his aid is his dead son’s best, and much misunderstood, friend Ajay. The underlying theme is quite clear: how commitment and responsibility to nation, community and society has to triumph over disproportionate moneymaking and profiteering. We know which side the film is on. Yet what irks is that despite such an ostensibly noble intent it should end up plugging India Gate flour and Ultratek cement in the most tacky and ridiculously insensate manner.
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Kareena seems to sleepwalk through the role of the fiery journalist Yasmin and has a perpetual smile pasted on her face, whether she is covering a significant movement or romancing the hero. Arjun does precious little other than disappear in the background. He is nothing more than a glamorous prop. It’s Big B and Ajay, crossing swords with each other and eventually helping each other out, who bring the film marginally alive. But can’t entirely rescue it.