Striker opens and closes with the tension around the slums during the 1992 riots. The on-location shooting brings to the proceedings a kind of clipped and cutting edge and an intimate immediacy. You feel you are there in the slums with Arora’s characters. But you aren’t sure you want to be there. We never stay long enough with the characters to get to know them well.
Film editor-director Chandan Arora’s Striker was not an easy film to make. It’s not an easy film to see either. The vast near-epic scale scope and expanse of the slum saga stretches into two hours of a non-linear narration where time passages are made without borders. The lack of punctuation marks in the telling of the tale of the coming of age and rage of the protagonist Surya (a striking Siddharth) is a major detriment in identifying the swarm of characters as people who go beyond the immediate job of living their grass root-level lives and try to repair their lives and restore a method of morality behind the madness of a fringe existence.
The madness of slum life and its eccentric crime modalities, as seen through the eyes of the growing and aimless Surya, is brought out in the way editor Sajit Unnikrishnan cuts the material. It is quite evident that director Chandan Arora has bitten more than the editor can finally chew. There are stretches of undisclosed narrative material that seem to have been sacrificed to a serious economy of expression that borders on an austerity overdrive. Characters such as the Muslim girl next door (newcomer Nicolette Bard) vanish from Surya’s life. But not before Surya does his own “Mere Mehboob” with the girl, even throwing a letter into her balcony. This is the Mumbai slum in the 1980s, in case you’ve forgotten. Many questions that crop up in the course of the narrative remain unanswered to the bitter, brutal end. All we know is that Surya wants a better life. He gets the bitter instead.
The performances keep us moving, kicking, and dragging with the seamless, unpunctuated narrative. Almost every character seems to get the point, Siddharth more so than most, with a performance that creates contours in the climate of chaos. His layered performance is balanced and even. Siddharth hits the high notes without getting shrill.
Striker uses the metaphor of the strike on the carrom board with a fair amount of inner conviction that unfortunately gets substantially lost in a welter of crowds and noises, signifying the fury of nulled lives. You can’t fall in love with Arora’s carefully-crafted world of slum-dogged obduracy where swords still rule and guns are a distant boom.
If you haven’t seen Striker, then see it for its frenetic characters, who seem to have distant links with the people we saw in Vikram Bhatt’s Ghulam and Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. Happily, the tragic outcome of the lives lived on the edge in the film is strictly their own.
Chandan Arora speaks on 15 years of Striker:
Tell me about the genesis of Striker?
I was researching for a documentary on lesser-known underworld players of Bombay through the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s when I came across the ghetto and slums of Malwani. That place is bursting at the seams with stories and characters. A period and a place where upgrading one’s life was not possible without resorting to some sort of criminal activity.
Is this where Striker began?
I found a story of Suryakant Bairalu, a national-level carrom player who had managed to do [upgrade his life] it with Carrom! This was unique. We put lots of incidents and anecdotes of different people to form the story and other characters and the film script started to take shape.
Was Siddharth your first choice to play Surya?
Siddharth was impressed by my previous work, and I was impressed by his. We were to make a love story with a studio, but that didn’t work out. However, we stayed in touch and discussed ideas. When Striker was taking shape, I mailed some material to him, and he jumped on it. Sid was as excited about the potential as I was, and there was no stopping us thereafter.
Do you regret the fact that Striker didn’t get the success it deserved?
Striker was released on the 5th of February in 2010, without any promotion or marketing, one week before Shahrukh Khan’s My Name is Khan, after a nine-month strike period of exhibitors when there were 5-6 films waiting to release every week! Since it was Siddharth’s first solo Hindi release after Rang De Basanti, of course, it deserved a better release and would have seen more success if it had been marketed better.
