Da-da-da-da-Dilli Dilli Dilli Dilli Dilli.......
Like the rat-a-tat-tat of a remorseless machine gun, the opening lines of the casting song rain on your senses, and like an incantation, spellbinds you to a piercing ride through a land of powers almost magical, called Delhi. Its a place where power gets heady, and goes out of control. The rest of the song is a boiling cauldron of epithets to the city, surprisingly from a lyricist (Amitabh Bhattacharya) who's an outsider. The ominous tunes of the number set the pace of things to follow (and what a fitting tribute to that number from Delhi-6 eulogizing the city, this one from Amit Trivedi has turned out!)
Alas, as the movie 'No One Killed Jessica' (NOKJ) unravels, it starts doing so verbally as well. Aimed as a 'largely authentic' version of the turn of events that marked the Jessica Lall murder case, it promised to hold a mirror to today's India, whose reflection is unflatteringly disfigured & yet corrigible. But it loses its way in the bylanes of Bollywood cliches. Perhaps the director took the task of dramatization of the real life events too literally.
There are moments of brilliant writing & performance in the movie, but sadly are interspersed with minutes & minutes of theatrics, which was the stuff you had wanted to avoid in the first place, when you queued up to buy the tickets of a different & stimulating movie. Sample this, the tunes of 'Aetbaar' haunting the on-screen proceedings, telling you of how trust is betrayed, defiled and how searing can the lachrymose aftermath be (with the repeated use of aetbaar in the lyrics, hammering home the point), and you want to join in the wailing of Sabrina Lall on her terrace, enacted here with a wasted sincerity by Vidya Balan; you want to scream out at the zillion instances of injustice being met out all around, on a daily basis - but sorry, the director denies you the chance of empathy - you want to feel for the characters but you can't.
Even the other protagonist of the film, Meera, is played with too much of a polemic aplomb by Rani Mukherjee, that it comes unstuck. She's a good-hearted bitch, who swears (and that's Rup-a-rup, borrowing from her song in the movie; given the aptly worded verbal lashing she belts out to a co-passenger in a flight), smokes & has NSA sex. To this, you might shrug and go 'so what?' Precisely, my point - friggin' predictable! Plus, all these above mentioned qualities would not even begin to describe a modern day bitch. They almost sound like virtues. But, as said before, the only department at full force in this movie are music & lyrics. Meera's song has a genuinely catchy 'Dhinchak dhinchak' opening piece, and some spirited singing (8 singers in the number!).
The movie also hashes up with the candle light vigils that became the hallmark of the silent common man's protests. One harks back to a similar scene from Rang De Basanti which urged you to stand up and be counted. The movie refers to it, but doesn't live up on the call-to-action quotient; perhaps this was the one failure on the part of the music department to challenge the pride within all of us. (I wonder if RDB started the trend of candle light vigils, or those had been in vogue before it too.)
But enough of laments. The one thing great that this movie does, is underline again the sliver of hope that still lights up our dark ages. And that is the greater common conscience, still alive in all of us. Despite the scores of miseries, and travesties of justice that we go through, we still spring back on our feet. This has come to play on number of occasions in the past - Kargil, 26/11, Mumbai 2005 deluge, Babri judgement in 2010, cases of Jessica Lall, Priyadarshini Mattoo, Nitish Katara, Ruchika Girhotra.
Alas, this feeling needs to be woken up repeatedly, else it keeps going back to sleep. Wonder what would it take to awaken all of us, permanently, to bring in a much-needed silent revolution: - borrowing from a dialogue in NOKJ, maybe a piece of G@&*d F@@du cinema.......which unfortunately this one ain't!
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