News To Go:
Hindi films tend to portray journalists as honest jholawalas, who often put their lives on the line to expose corruption, hold those in power accountable, fight social evils, and so on. Journalism stopped being the Fourth Estate, a while back, but it did have its glory days when dons and politicians were toppled.
Hansal Mehta’s web series, Scoop, inspired by the real-life murder of journalist J. Dey, from the point of view of fellow reporter, Jigna Vora, co-accused in the case, did a fine job of capturing the newsrooms of urban media.
Joy Bag (Manoj Bajpayee), the unheroic hero of Kanu Behl’s Despatch (on ZEE5) supposedly the star crime reporter of a down-on-its-luck newspaper, looks perpetually baffled. Digital media is cutting into the newspaper business, by delivering the news faster. By the time the morning paper reports a story, television and social media have killed it.
Word is that the Despatch newspaper has been taken over by an industrial house. In a situation of near redundancy, Joy starts by investigating the daylight murder of a gangster, and uncovers a nest of vipers..
Since Joy blunders about tossing words like IPL Scam, 2G Scam, D Company, corruption that runs right into Delhi power bases, the viewer is none the wiser about what exactly he is investigating and how. All he seems to do is bark commands at shady informers to get him info or files, and they acquiesce. Meanwhile, he has a number of sex scenes (a nude Bajpayee–totally avoidable!), which are gratuitous to the plot. Perhaps they are meant to show a flawed and emotionally dishonest man, who is unfaithful to his wife (Shahana Goswami), uses a lover (Arrchita Agarwaal) to ghost write his book, casually humps a rival female reporter (Rii Sen) who has better sources than him, and is surprisingly willing to share.
Joy Bag is a nasty piece of work, and the director seems to shrug the blame the audience for even trying to like this man or rooting for him, because after all his blundering around from Delhi to London, he is never seen producing a line of scoop-worthy copy. It is only towards the end, it becomes clear that he is a fictionalized version of J. Dey.
It is rare to see Manoj Bajpayee falter– he simply does not find the key to the character. The others around do their bit, but he also sucks the energy off every scene.
(This piece first appeared in seniorstoday.in)
