The Nana Patekar-John Abraham film, Taxi No 9211, released 19 years ago and Subhash K Jha looks back at the movie that is a drama, a thriller and a comedy all rolled into one.
Milan Luthria’s Taxi No 9211 is a fearless fable about the feel before the fall. The ‘heroes’—if one may call them that—are two losers from two totally different stratas of life. Nana Patekar is the inebriated, sullen, deceitful taxi driver who has told his wife (Sonali Kulkarni) and son (Ashwin Chitale, the child prodigy from the Marathi film Shwaas) that he’s a government officer.
Broken rule: never lie about your job when you’re on the road all the time.
John Abraham is the spoilt rich heir who spends his time drinking, fornicating, and making out with hedonism.
Broken rule: don’t tempt a nemesis into catching up.
As luck and scriptwriter Rajat Aroraa would have it, the two unlikely ‘heroes’ end up lending a shoulder to one another. Besides the striking lead pair who epitomize the spirit of frictional camaraderie, the best aspect of Taxi No 9211 is its amazing eye for locational detail. Not a moment in the terse and crisply edited (Aarif Shaikh) narrative is confined to a studio. The camera explores the non-glamorous side of Mumbai with penetrating panache.The crowded streets, the dingy chawls, and the high-rise apartments mingle in a bustle of audio-visual lucidity. But there’s no anxiety to bring Mumbai alive. It just happens to come to life without trying.
Patekar and Abraham do the rest. Their interactive conflicts are cleverly written. We never feel the weight of their combined charisma as it collides and creates the kind of masculine sparks that are rare to mainstream Hindi films.
Director Milan Luthria dares to go against the grain. The profile and contour of the narration are cosmopolitan. And yet, at heart, Taxi No 9211 is a purely homespun morality tale about people who choose not to take responsibility for their actions.Many of the episodes work beyond the spaces that are created so cleverly on screen. John’s self-realization is especially well-mapped in the plot. We never know when it creeps up on us and how the grim tone about the compromises that mar the smooth flow of existence, colour the frothy mood of the initial sequences.
To slot Taxi No 9211 as a road caper would be a creative crime. This is a film that goes far beyond the thrills provided on screen. Of those (the thrills), there’s no dearth. The traffic of stress on the crowded roads of Mumbai (excellently staged by stunt director Abbas Ali Moghul) coalesces effortlessly with the sensitive thought processes which underline this gently forceful take on the theme of male bonding.
In the deepest recesses of this cannily crafted rage drama, there’s a softly beating heart that tells us to love life. Life in Taxi No 9211 isn’t beautiful. Not really. Luthria looks at Mumbai’s underbelly with much affection and some regret. He makes optimum use of the spatial disharmony of the metropolis to carve out a story of one day in the life of two absolutely disparate individuals who change each other’s outlook in unexpected ways.
The expertly packaged human drama is bolstered and held in place by the two central performances. Nana is a raging volcano of middle-class angst. He’s done the clash act repeatedly. But manages to make it look different once again. We feel for the characters and environment that the director constructs out of the raw material that we secrete in our hearts. Living in a concrete jungle is a constant struggle. Milan Luthria satirizes the struggle of survival and finally makes the serio-comic act of survival a statement on urban morality.
After the failed film’s release, I asked Milan Luthria why a strange title like Taxi No 9211. “Just a title suggested by someone which we thought suited the film’s mood….And before you ask, it isn’t a remake of the Tom Cruise-Jamie Foxx film Collateral. That’s a very dark film. Ours is a light-hearted film. The whole idea was to do a film against the clock, like Run Lola Run, Phone Booth and Enemy of The State. It’s a twenty-four story in a mad city and what happens to two guys who meet one day. Nana and John play two guys who don’t want to take responsibility for their lives being in a disarray. They come to a point where they realize they’re quite like each other. I agree my Kachche Dhaage was about the bonding between Ajay Devgan and Saif Ali Khan. But it was hardly the first of its kind. I’d say my producer Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay was the first big male bonding film. It’s a nice territory to explore. It always breaks the clutter. Taxi No 9211 breaks the mould, though I can’t say whether it cracks a new genre. Maybe it’s been done somewhere. When we started out Nana had taken a hiatus. John wasn’t doing well at all—he had given Elaan, Karam, etc. It was very hard to raise funds. We were told we were going down the wrong road. We pulled through. I’d look at them and say, ‘The film is coming together after all.’ I changed my entire team. I got a crew from LA, got a new-age music director Vishal-Shekhar. The film, at 1 hour 55 minutes, is one of the shortest ever in Hindi. “I remember director Joel Schumacher saying, ‘When making a film against the clock, don’t give the audience time to think.’
