Can this really have been the first Indian production I've seen in two years? Guess I'd finished most of the promising ones I knew of. Anyway, I had a lot of time to kill, so I chose the longest feature on my Netflix list, at 163 minutes. It's a Hindi remake of a 2013 Malayalam pic by the same title, so be careful if you go looking for it. Then again, the two have nearly equal IMDb ratings.
Vijay (Ajay Devgn) runs a cable installation service in Goa. He tends to stay late at the office watching movies rather than spending time with wife Nandini (Shriya Saran), teen daughter Anju (Ishita Dutta), and single-digit daughter Anu (Mrunal Jadhav). But when Anju accidentally kills Sam (Rishab Chadha), a peer trying to blackmail her or Nanditi into sex, Vijay gets off his duff to obscure all evidence. Alas, Sam's mother, Meera (Tabu), is a hardened inspector general who will stop at nothing to find her son, and Vijay has been antagonizing the rather corrupt Sub-Inspector Gaitonde (Kamlesh Sawant) lately....
Unlike other Indian cinema that comes to my mind, this one deliberately raises an interesting moral question. While we do feel some pity for Meera and her husband, Mahesh (Rajat Kapoor), and Vijay's actions are obviously dishonest and illegal, we can hardly blame him for not wanting his daughter punished under the circumstances. The blackmail consists of threatening to upload a sneaky video of Anju in the shower (not shown in detail to us), so it's not like she'd done anything scandalous beforehand. Young as Sam is, he basically has it coming. Had I been there, I might have promised a lawsuit if he went through with it, whereas Anju and Nanditi merely plead before resorting to violence to grab his phone. Then again, the family probably couldn't afford a lawyer good enough to win against the son of an inspector general.
On that note, if you think U.S. cops are bad, you'll really hate the department in Goa. When Meera comes up with a plausible explanation linking Vijay to Sam's disappearance but has no proof, she has the family arrested and beaten bloody, trying to exact a confession. Even Anu is not spared. Mahesh does meekly object that this is illegal, but none of the many witnessing officers acts remotely perturbed. I can see where Sam got his mercilessness. But mercifully to us, this is not one of those foreign flicks with zero comeuppance for rotten authorities.
If you're looking for Bollywood/Tollywood whimsy, keep looking. There are no musical sequences per se, only a couple montages accompanied by singing from an unseen source. If there's any comic relief, I'm afraid it takes the form of Vijay verbally abusing young employee Jose (Prathamesh Parab), or at least Jose's reactions thereto.
Not to say there's no fun to be had. This isn't all respectably dire like A Separation. It's a thrill to watch Vijay, repeatedly identified as a fourth-grade dropout, outsmarting everyone by using techniques he learned from obsessively watching the screen. He's certainly resourceful when it counts.
Your mileage may vary in how you feel about a story with no outright heroes. But while Drishyam feels longer than necessary, I am glad I watched it all. It's about as smart as the Indian film industry gets.
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