Does Vikrant Massey ever disappoint? In 2023 we saw him sweep across the nation’s collective conscience in 12th Fail with a yearning performance that yelled at educational elitism.
Earlier this year Vikrant sent a chill up the nation’s collective spine playing a gruesome unapologetic mass killer in Sector 36. He is now back in The Sabarmati Report in a role that allows him to do what he is best at: play an underdog who rises when pushed and prodded into a corner.
Vikrant plays a Hindi channel journalist Samar who is pushed around by his bosses at the television broadcast station on account of his vernacular identity.
This part of the film could easily have been ‘12th Fail Part 2’. But it is not. Vikrant is the kind of rare actor who finds unique unexplored spaces in every character he plays.
My two favourite sequences in The Sabarmati Report feature Vikrant in a suitably whittled down but ebullient mood where he plays up his in a car and in a flight. In the first, Samar tries hard to let his upperclass(English speaking) girlfriend know how indebted he is for a second chance after a fight.
“Let’s make out(sic),” Samar suggest gratefully. Make up being alien to this actor/character.
Then in a flight Samar puts forward his well-rehearsed angrezi thankyou speech (imagine Massey being spontaneous even when required to be rehearsed) to his immediate senior, an uppity, supercilious attractive woman named Manika (Riddhi Dogra) telling her how grateful he is for the chance to work with her.
Manika teases him for his rehearsed rhetorics in English.
Propelling a well-defined story of a Hindi journalist’s prideful metamorphosis into a substantial voice of the nation, it is one helluva graph-centric role, and Vikrant rises far above the script which has its lean patches.
The overall effect however is that of a film which wants to tell the truth even if the truth does hurt a section of our people.The narrative is confidently scripted as an investigative drama. The punctuation marks are not always at the correct points.
There is one intriguing sequence with the screen supremely stern version of Sonia Gandhi(Hella Stichlmair) wherein it is insinuated that she was agreeable to a fabricated narrative about the savage incident on the Godhra railway station as it suited her political purposes.
The screen Sonia Gandhi looked so stoic, she seemed to be thinking about what she is doing there. Luckily, most of the two-hour film is all there. There are no distracting songs and no romantic interludes. To the point, and concise The Sabarmati Report is agreeably austere and tactical.
This political narrative is quickly pushed under the carpet. The Sabarmati Report is neither keen on or equipped to go deep into the politics of the Godhra incident. What it tries to do is to provide a racy onscreen version of the truth. In that endeavour the films succeeds impressively.
