Scuttlebutt High:
In the twilight world of Hindi films about politics, there’s always an election about to take place, that justifies the heightened level of murderous mayhem that ensues. For a film that has liberal hearts bleeding for an innocent butcher slaughtered during a riot, Sudhir Mishra’s Afwaah has an inordinately high body count. (The visual of the man begging for mercy with folded hands is deliberately reminiscent of that famous photo from the time of the Gujarat riots.)
While Mishra’s earlier political films like Yeh Woh Manzil To Nahin and Hazaron Khwahishein Aisi were ruminations on the involvement of youth in grassroots causes, Afwaah seems to have been made to fit an agenda, to reiterate anti-establishment credentials and poke the sleeping lion in its cage, without really stepping close enough to get slashed. Most of the story takes place over one night, revisiting the format of Mishra’s thriller, Is Raat Ki Subah Nahin. He does make some valid points about fake news and viral tweets going out of control– but afwaah means rumour, which is actually quite different from spreading doctored videos.
The two people caught in the web woven by a bunch of ruthless men are Rahab Ahmad (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), the American-returned, upper class Muslim man, who has the superior and mostly naïve idea that his campus talks are making a difference; and Nivedita ‘Nivi’ Singh (Bhumi Pednekar), daughter of a Rajasthan leader, being forced to marry Vikram (Sumeet Vyas) as part of a political alliance.
Vikram’s election rally had ended in the stone-pelting riot and the on-camera murder of the butcher. Nivi is so horrified by it, that she runs away from home, with Vikram’s men in pursuit. When innocent bystander Rahab intervenes, and rescues Nivi, he enters a nightmare of violence. Vikram’s social media minion tells him the video of Nivi’s escape makes him look weak, so he spins it into a Love Jihad story, setting off gangs of bike-riding hounds. Vikram had already ordered a corrupt cop Tomar (Sumeet Kaul), to kill his loyal henchman, Chandan (Sharib Hashmi), to distance himself from the riot fiasco. Chandan dodges the bullet and over the night there are multiple chases (Mauricio Vidal trying with limited success to capture the menace of the landscape in artificially illuminated darkness), to who-know-what end, because the script (Mishra with Shiv Shankar Bajpai and Nisarg Mehta) throws up and spins several rings in the air, some of them deflecting from the main issue. But if the audience it swept up in the outrageous goings on, it’s because in these times hate is so easily whipped up and amplified on social media.
Mishra does point fingers at the intelligentsia—people in a Lit Fest, who calmly watch a terrible cultural programme, ignoring the pleas of man banging on the door, and also the obviously phoney video circulating on the net. Which is not entirely fair, since literary and cultural denizens do protest against communalism; Mishra lets the irresponsible media and motivated political parties off the hook. The chaos has more patriarchal than communal origins—how dare the woman defy her fate!; any man who came to her aid would paint a target on his back.
There is a satirical scene towards the end, that hits out at the cow worshippers with an amusingly subversive whip—the film needed more of this cheeky humour. To give credit where due, Mishra’s two major female characters, Nivi and an exploited female cop (TJ Bhanu) give it back to the patriarchy with aplomb. The actors are adequate– no surprises, no stand-out performance.
A filmmaker entering the maze of north Indian social or political skullduggery and the tinder-box nature of mob violence, should keep in mind the copious amounts of similar content on streaming platforms, if the déjà vu Afwaah evokes is to be avoided.
(This piece first appeared in scroll.in)
