Neeraj Ghaywan’s incendiary Masaan has finally met its match. Debutant director Shazia Iqbal hits the ball out of the park in this towering remake. She polishes up and edifies the Tamil film Pariyerum Perumal to the extent that even the makers of the original would be awed and grateful.
There is not a moment to spare for humbug in Iqbal and her co-writer Rahul Badwelkar’s writing . Wringing out the essence of the original—a star-crossed love story about a Dalit boy and an upperclass girl—Dhadak 2 gives us film that opens up chapter after chapter of ostensibly unrehearsed ingenuity.
The film is slick and smart without overdoing it, wise beyond what the original could have ever imagined, and relevant to the point of making practically every recent film look like an over-musicalized fairytale.
The debutant director knows her chops and can handle the theme’s inherent violence without choreographing casteism. The film exudes a unique aura of spontaneity even in its most rehearsed interludes. Doing away with the rawness of the original, the film replaces it with a polished surface and on-the-ball editing(Charu Shree Roy, Omkar Uttam Sakpal, Sangeeth Varghese) which repudiate any trace of exploitation.
Many a times cinema about exploitation transmutes into an exploitative object.
Not this time. Oh no! The love story of a boy from the village (Siddhant Chaturvedi, remarkably in character) and the citybred privileged princess in wailing, Vidhi (Tripti Dimri, struggling to express her character unvoiced anguish) illuminates every frame, scatters the taut narration with a sense of unexplored resplendence.
Yes, the love story works swimmingly. Chaturvedi in spite of his fake tan, confers a genuineness to his character construction from timidity to rebellion to beyond. He should get every award this year. Dimri is okay in parts. But she lets down the screenplay(and herself) in two crucial sequences. That scream at the end feels unearned.
I truly loved Shazia Iqbal’s handling of two crucial episodes from the original: the hero Neelesh’s assault and humiliation by his girlfriend’s relatives at a wedding, and the humiliation of Neelesh’s crossdressing father (Vipin Sharma, brilliant) at Neelesh’s college.
Anubha Fatehpuria as Neelesh’s mother gives us goosebumps every time she is on screen
These shocking examples of the empowered brutalizing the disempowered will shake the audiences’ conscience.
Vipin Sachdeva as the honour- killer on the prowl (nor a criminal, he says, but a social reformist) is chilling. His track too has been refurbished beyond recognition.
The real love story , if you ask me, is the one between Neelesh and the Dalit activist Shekhar Manji (played by a brilliant actor Priyank Tiwari). Shekhar’s character is evidently based on Rohith Vermula, the Dalit activist who wasn’t. The entire Neelesh-Shekhar arc in the plot is not a part of the original Tamil film. It is what furnishes this film with a tenable throbbing emotional quality.
For me, Dhadak 2 is an experience far beyond the original. This is not a remake. It is an intelligent emotional recreation which irons out the rough edges, makes the original characters sharper and more authentic, adds new ones, imbuing the endproduct with a vigorous glow. Don’t think about it, just go for it.
