Subhash K Jha revisits Tigmanshu Dhulia’s directorial debut, the crime drama Haasil, starring Jimmy Sheirgill, Hrishitaa Bhatt, Irrfan Khan and Ashutosh Rana, which released 22 years ago.
After years of honing his considerable talent on television, Tigmanshu Dhulia made his cinematic debut with an ominously real and yet stirringly cinematic exposition on student unrest in a small, dusty North Indian town where goons entered politics through the easy-access route of classroom elections.
This is a world of despair, darkness, debt, and finally death. To Dhulia’s credit, he doesn’t lose his grip over the grammar of street-level violence even while trying to carve a palatable love story amidst the incessant outpouring of sleazy crime and violence.
This thoroughly unorthodox and yet intimately penetrable study of youthful unrest (touched upon earlier in stray mainstream films like N. Chandra’s Ankush, Rahul Rawail’s Arjun and Goldie Behl’s Bas Itna Sa Khwab Hai, which incidentally Dhulia was involved with) begins with a college function. Even as the principal lectures the students and teachers, two gangs clash in the corridors.
And the film’s febrile mood is immediately set. The juxtaposition of ideology and violence, and the supreme superimposition of the latter along with the complete destruction of finer values, are remarkably tangible thematic thrusts in Dhulia’s narrative.
Unlike other new directors in recent times, Tigmanshu Dhulia knows how to hold the camera in a steady gaze without losing his audience. Every shot of his doesn’t have to be brief and cursory. As we follow the path of damnation with our protagonist Annirudh(a thoroughly well-cast Jimmy Sheirgill), we encounter a wealth of cinematic skills that Dhulia meshes into his seething plot.
The narrative conquers formalistic snags without losing its ability to wangle a captive audience. Initially, the authentic anti-social chatter(penned by Dhulia himself) would puzzle the metropolitan viewer, for whom a campus romance means designer dudes and dolls strutting around splashy college corridors that are interchangeable with pub lobbies.
Dhulia’s city and campus are so ruggedly real, you want to give him full marks for shooting on location in North India with his actors who get into man-powered rickshaws without the least self-consciousness. Often the camera espies hordes of onlookers staring at the goings-on. Nevertheless, the consideration for genuine locales far exceeds the unsettling gaze of the crowds in Allahabad’s dusty roads and volatile college campus.
You only wish the visibly gifted cinematographer Rafey Mehmood had desisted from using so much orange and blue, especially in the romantic songs. Even in the otherwise riveting scenes of campus and street violence, the cinematography is too pretty, almost filmy in its lollipop lusciousness. The camera stands strangely outside the circle of believability as though to remind us not to get too involved with the grainy authenticity of Dhulia’s plot.
Luckily for us, the characters don’t lose their authentic plumes even when the director takes off with them in search of a state-of-the-art climactic confrontation, shot live at the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad. In the last overture of the film, when Shergill’s character acquires patently heroic wings for a bloodied battle with the antagonist(Irrfan Khan), Dhulia steers his narrative with virility and fluency into the standard cat-and-mouse format from action films.
While the rest of the narrative is relaxed, the last half-hour gets into a hurried lather.
Dhulia is doubtlessly driven by an element of dynamism sorely lacking in the average debutant director who either focusses to much or too little in crafting the narrative in a commercially palatable format. Dhulia goes all the way with his gritty narrative. In spite of an eminently disposable Qawwalli, the sequences where the lovers on the run hide in a mosque’s compound dare to touch on the politics of communalism while retaining an idealism at the core of the murky issue.
Haasil tries to shatter many myths that have erupted around the commercial cinema. Dhulia doesn’t take the audiences’ intelligence for granted, nor does it shirk from stretching the boundaries of entertainment. Without sacrificing an iota of his grainy and gutsy vision, Dhulia keeps us watching, and also wondering why we suffer through so much shallowness in the name of escapist entertainment.
Though a brilliant dialogue writer (Sheirgill’s terse closing outburst against the chief minister where he says crime has now entered the common man’s household and he has no choice but to fight back, makes the viewers’ hairs stand on-end) Dhulia’s specially good at holding the camera on the silent moments. In the romantic songs, it’s the eyes of the lovers and not the songs’ lyrics that hold our attention. And though flush with stunning violence (limbs get slashed, shot, and bombed as a part of a day’s work), it’s the implosive inward-drawn interludes that amplify the aggression of a wayward generation.
For instance, the moment when criminal student-leader Ranvijay Singh (Irrfan Khan) threatens to put Niharika’s mom (Navnee Parihar) on the wedding mandap when Niharika elopes with Annirudh is so sudden and shockingly aberrant that we flinch in horror. Dhulia goes into areas of social concern, such as the caste carnage and the politics of communalism that have so far been taboo in mainstream cinema. In doing so, he has created a new idiom of cinematic expression in Hindi cinema where the spoken and unspoken words co-exist in a collage of conflicting and yet harmonious ideas.
Dhulia doesn’t forget his sense of humour because he is seriously stricken by social order. The sequence in a cinema hall where Ranvir Singh and his goons discuss the difference between the “sophisticated” underworld violence in Mumbai and its crude version in their own part of the world is savagely satirical.
It’s hard to imagine Dhulia’s film without the actors featured. Each performer, big or small, blends into the bloodied and volatile ambience. Trained actors Ashutosh Rana and Murad Ali (filmmaker Muzaffar Ali’s son) induce a special flavour to the roles of loutish student leaders.
Jimmy Shergill comes into his own with a performance that allows his character to grow from a rebellious son (his scenes with his screen father, Tinnu Anand, are so real you wonder if they are from the director’s own life) to a corrupted sidekick of a criminal youth leader and finally, a conscientious citizen who redeems his soul.
Irrfan Khan is, in one word, outstanding. He plays the student leader Ranvijay Singh as a man who makes no apologies for his sociopathic conduct and moves to a self-regulated ideology.
I have a special word for Abhishek Ray’s background music, which breaks new ground in establishing a leitmotif linking the characters with their thoughts and actions.
Haasil is a work of art bustling with thoughts that have an immediate and indelible bearing on the quality of our life. To have created such a decisive balance between “cinema” and social statement couldn’t have been easy. This isn’t an “easy” film to see. It’s been a while since a movie on the nation’s plunge into damnation conveyed so much of the creator’s anguish to the audience without making us feel stifled by the stench of corruption.
