But this humanisation came through an exquisitely portrayed romance, while here, despite Lakhna spending a lot of screen time with Indumati (Bhumi Pednekar) - and despite our expectations when big-name male and female stars are thrown together - there is not an iota of love. You could point to Mujhe Jeene Do and say, correctly, that the dacoits were humanised in that film, too. If the ruthless Gabbar Singh made the dacoits of Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai look like a bunch of sentimental play-actors, the scruffy, smaller-than-life men of Sonchiriya make Gabbar Singh look like a theatrical ham. Why set the movie in this particular year? To conflate the death of democracy with the dying days of dacoity? Or maybe it’s because the year would see the release of Sholay, which contains the most iconic representation of the dacoit in Hindi cinema - an image that Sonchiriya works assiduously to break. These opening scenes, with their lack of explicit pop-culture markers, feel timeless, and it isn’t till these rebels set out to loot a gold-splattered wedding that we realise it’s 1975: the Emergency is announced on the radio. Lakhna (Sushant Singh Rajput) says that he was once proud to call himself a dacoit (though, instead of daku, he uses the term baaghi, rebel), but now he only feels shame. The dead snake may carry a curse, but this is already a cursed land, and these are already cursed people. Or in a placid river, where a crocodile lurks, threatening to turn an all-too-rare idyll into a scene of carnage. For these dacoits, in the Chambal, bad luck is always in the foreground, strewn across their path. The visual weightage seems appropriate when we learn that a dead snake is bad luck. Abhishek Chaubey’s Sonchiriya opens with the image of flies swarming around a rotting snake carcass (seen in an extreme close-up) – and in the far distance, out of focus, we see a group of dacoits walking towards it.
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May 2023
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