There is a visceral anguish at the core of this….this…thriller? Is director Karan Tejpal’s directorial debut a thriller? As much as Devashish Makhija’s Joram in which Manoj Bajpayee was a man on the run with a baby, wrongly accused of murdering his wife.
In Stolen, there is a baby and two men on the run with a woman who may or may not be the baby Champa’s mother. Who knows what lies underneath what we tend to think of as the civilized surface?
Tejpal’s bewildering, beguiling, but tragically identifiable world of deception and disempowerment is crusted by a powerful sense of purpose and crested by a highly contagious sense of urgency .
This is a world where babies are snatched at railway platforms. When one such incident happens one night on a deserted railway platform, well-to-do brothers Gautam and Raman Bansal(played with compelling credibility by Abhishek Banerjee and Shubham Vardhan) should have just turned a blind eye and proceeded to their mother’s wedding(yes, that is a little smirking joke that the cops in the film get to enjoy).
But then, Raman has what no upwardly mobile Indian can afford: a conscience.
Hence begins a riveting road movie with Raman and his reluctant elder brother Gautam carrying the baby Champa and her tribal mother Jhumpa(Mia Maelzer) on a car ride that none of the four travellers, and us, the audience, are likely to forget.
Stolen has a raw unvarnished air to its unfolding. Not that the editor, Shreyas Beltangdy, slept on his job. Far from it. The projected image of a viscerally driven plot secretes a genuine comprehension of the deep bonding between violence and patriarchy in India’s rural hinterland.
It isn’t clear where Karan Tejpal’s locates his spellbinding cat-and-mouse trailblazer. From the accent (spoken) and the accent on casual, brutal violence, this seems to be Haryana, although admittedly, the compendium of corrupt cops, mob violence, and baby snatching could be happening in any part of India: all we have to do is shut the air conditioner and look out of the window.
Karan Tejpal, in what would rank as one of the more impressive directorial debut in recent times, dares to crane his neck out from a speeding train, in a manner of speaking. His actors, the three principal ones and the profusion of supporting players who come and go with a disruptive randomness, are all so authentic they seem like participants in a reality show , shot by a hidden camera.
Cinematographers Isshaan Ghosh and Sachin S. Pillai do quite a lot of very interesting guerrilla styled shooting , especially in a heartstopping sequence of mob lynching in a cloistered village where the narrow lanes hide a hideous history of violence.
Abhishek Banerjee , the only known face in the cast (not his fault, really) goes far beyond the call of duty, gets authentically hit in a way never seen before in our cinema.
Stolen is a pathbreaker for many reasons. It breaks not just the rules of the moribund mainstream cinema, but also proves itself a first among Indie films, a genuine pathbreaker for shooting a thriller that doesn’t aspire to be a thriller.
Two unsuspecting brothers getting embroiled in a baby snatching racket: does that sound like a thriller? That it does grip us from the word go only goes to prove that, in some corners, Indian cinema is indeed evolving.
