Animal Crackers:
This film with its animal-loving protagonist, is so earnest, that with a few tweaks, it could make for a sweet children’s film, with a message about treating animals with care.
Lakadbaggha (Hyena), directed by Victor Mukherjee, is set in Kolkata, where a hoodie-wearing, skilled martial arts fighter has just stopped a shipment of drugs stuffed into dead animals. This scene is kept off screen, but another action sequence with “hoodie boy” as they call him, Arjun Bakshi (Anshuman Jha), is filmed in much detail, when a man almost runs over a dog and then gets into a fight.
Arjun thrashes the three goons for being so callous towards a “pilla,” (puppy) and the cops realise they have an animal vigilante to hunt for. The crime branch officer, Akshara D’Souza (Ridhi Dogra) is given the case, and does little to actually solve it, except pinning photos on a bulletin board.
She encounters Arjun, who works in a library that doubles as a courier service, when he comes to her office to deliver a package (her divorce papers!), and later, she is impressed by his innocence, when she sees him searching for a lost “dog friend”. She must be the most clueless cop in the city, because the drugs and animal-trafficking ring is run by her brother Aryan (Paresh Pahuja–the best actor of the lot).
When Aryan’s dog show turns down Arjun’s stray dog because Indian breeds are not allowed to participate, he protests, and strangely enough, Aryan invites him over for dinner! The cop sister gets into flirty mode, as if fraternising with delivery men is routine. (No office towards couriers intended, but Indian society has not yet reached that evolved stage of ignoring class.) There was potential for Arjun to prove his theory about the superiority of Indian breeds, by his pet beating a fancy foreign dog, but perhaps it was too difficult to film without extensive CGI.
It is not quite clear if Arjun is on the autistic spectrum, but he is shown to be “different” as a child, due to which he gets bullied by schoolmates and is trained in martial arts by her father (Milind Soman), who, sadly appears in a brief sequence, when there could have been some karate kid style fun built in.
The eponymous hyena makes an entry eventually and is saved by Arjun from being smuggled to a Gulf collector called “Mr Gandhi” who is Aryan’s customer. Meanwhile in a bizarre show of racism, a local Chinese restaurant is shown to be serving dog meat instead of mutton. Arjun also has a kinky North-Eastern henchwoman (Eksha Kerung), who supposedly likes the taste of blood and enjoys killing.
Meanwhile, Arjun teaches the hyena to obey his commands, which is not what a real animal activist would do.
The action sequences in Lakadbaggha are well choreographed, and a highlight of the film, which takes up too many issues and does not quite do justice to them. The climax is shocking and could have been avoided in a film that is making a case for protecting animals.
(This piece first appeared in rediff.com)
