Actually, it is not a female version of a bromance. The two ladies who start off as collaborators never get a chance to come close. Fate and the screenwriters have other plans in Amazon’s System, a dark, trenchant probe into disingenuous power-play featuring actors who know how to negotiate the cracks in storytelling without soiling their sandals.
There is a lot to be said about the impeccable casting of Ashwiny Iyer Tiwary’s courtroom parable about two women who reach out to each other from across the glass barrier, shattering some myths about bra-mancing, while at the same time adding a few muscles to onscreen muliebrity by allowing the two protagonists their character flaws without apology, allowing them to grow, and groan, so to speak.
Jyotika, in yet another powerful character assumption, is Sarika Rawat, a severely underprivileged stenographer barely able to make ends meet, but … well, chugging along like most of us. Jyotika’s personality conveys resilience, resolve, and protest. She is a fractured soul and not ashamed of it.
Sonakshi Sinha’s Neha Rajvansh is the opposite (rather conveniently so), a privileged attorney’s rebellious daughter fighting “reverse nepotism” at home. Her troubled relations with her lawyer father Ravi Rajvansh (Ashutosh Gowariker, well cast in a Manish Chaudhary role) is explored with restrain. Many of the dramatic troughs in the plot seem frayed at the edges.
Director Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari doesn’t shy away from the bugle calls of déjà vu. She takes on the foreseen and the familiar with confidence and some fearlessness, especially in the way boyfriends and lovers are brought into the plot. They don’t seem like props, even when the protagonists seem to be using them as such.
It is in the second half that the narrative becomes problematic. The writers steer the two female heroes to a crisis, but don’t seem to know how to get them out of it. Ironically, the characters work the best when they are not in the courtroom, even though this IS a courtroom drama… right?
A murder at the midpoint is the muddle point, from which the courageous but compromised screenplay fails to pull itself out. There are so many ways this could have been a pathbreaking portrayal of two gutsy, unapologetic women at the crossroads. Instead, System begins to show signs of wear and tear as it chugs towards a climax .
We can’t say we saw it coming. But by building up to the unexpected, a screenplay isn’t doing the characters any service. Not this time.
There is so much here that is worth clutching close to one’s heart that the flaws are best ignored. Oh yes, one more thing: when in a budget eatery, Sonakshi Sinha really eats, unlike that plate of roadside noodles which Saif Ali Khan just holds in his hand in Kartavya.
