In this throwback interview, Subhash K Jha revisits the film and re-shares his conversation with Rajkummar Rao about the drama Trapped, which released in 2017.
What would you do if you were trapped in a highrise for days without food, water, or company? Eat a bird, although you are vegetarian? Check. Drink your own urine to quench your thirst? Check. Talk to a rat, for company’s sake? Check.
The talented Rajkummar Rao, no stranger to internalized performances, immerses himself in Vikram Motwane’s Trapped with such arresting authenticity that after a while, we cease to watch the skill that underlines the outstanding performance.
All we see is the suffering of the trapped soul, his desperation to get out of that apartment where Shourya is locked away, far from civilization, though not even a road away from the bustle. Unlike other great survival dramas like Robert Zemeckis’ Castaway or Ang Lee’s The Life Of Pi (the latter exceedingly overpraised), Trapped is set right in the heart of a swarming city filled with people who … How do we put this politely?….don’t give a duck about the next person.
Motwane, who also helmed the underwhelming Lootera, brings out the apathy in the large city in a sequence where Rao announces his departure to his flatmates. They barely muster a response, and one of them indifferently asks where he is going.
The answer is not relevant. The preamble, which includes a sudden eruption of romance with a woman named Noorie (Geetanjali Thapa), ends just as suddenly once Rao’s character is trapped in an apartment so far removed from human contact that no scream of help reaches anyone’s ear. It’s a terrifying premise executed effectively by a script that relentlessly explores the theme of isolation and survival.
Cinematographer Siddharth Diwan is as fearless behind the camera as Rao is in front. Together, they shoot Shourya’s growing decline and fading hope for rescue with minimalist magnificence. The shots are cut with no room for lingering woundedness. If Shourya bleeds, we can’t look away. Rao’s projection of his character’s waning strength is as authentic as Tom Hanks in Castaway.
Rao’s Shourya is no islanded recluse. The little apartment perched smugly and stoically in the sky is all the world that Motwane’s plot inhabits. There are no frills and no digressions. The background score by Aloknanda Dasgupta is used with rationed effect, quite like time, food, water, and hope running out on the protagonist. The one time that the background score lights up the soundscape is when Shourya collects rainwater in every vessel he can find in his high-rise prison.
It is an interlude that reminds us of what we have, and what we take for granted can be snatched away within moments. Even the flashbacks are severely restricted (just one, actually, when we see Shourya arguing passionately in favour of vegetarianism before being forced to eat a bird in the present crisis). What we get is the core element of survival. The very epicenter of self-preservation where no action or reaction is prohibited. It is very difficult for one actor to hold our attention for two hours.
Rajkummar Rao gets our undivided attention unconditionally. His character’s awful predicament is so tangibly tactile as to leave us shaken for good. Among the many remarkable hurdles that Motwane’s storytelling crosses with its beleaguered protagonist is the whole idea of getting the geographical periphery of the crisis right. The apartment building, the isolated flat, and its distance from any human contact are all measured out by the storytellers so that we never feel we are being tricked into believing in Shourya’s crisis.
At one point during the actor’s journey from self-assertion to self-abnegation and beyond, we see Rajkummar Rao’s trousers fall off from his waist to the ground. This is probably a random unscheduled crisis that was allowed to remain on the editing table. It helps serve two purposes. It shows the character’s complete repudiation of vanity in the face of death. It also shows how much weight the actor has lost in the course of his journey. It’s hard to imagine Trapped working so effectively without Rajkummar Rao. He lives every second of Shourya’s struggle for self-preservation. His journey is so illustrative of a migrant’s metropolitan melancholy as to make any attempt to add signboards to the storytelling is akin to shining torchlight to supplement sunlight.
Playing a man trapped in an apartment in a highrise for nearly two weeks without food or water, Raj shed over 10 kilos to look like a man who is unlikely to survive his ordeal. Such dedication to depicting desolation was evident only in Tom Hanks when he did Castaway.
Says Rajkummar Rao, “In 2017, I had a whole gamut of performances and films from Bareilly Ki Barfi to Newton. I received the Filmfare award for Trapped. The whole shoot of Trapped was a very organic process. Apart from working on the character’s background and his relationship with other people, I decided to live every moment as it came. One really can’t prepare how one would react if one is living without food and water for days.”
Rao actually stopped eating and drinking. “Fortunately we were shooting in sequence, I stopped eating and drinking after day 1 of my character being trapped and post that I was just reacting in the moment and was trying to live each moment truthfully. During the course of our shoot, I realised that for our body, having water is more important than having food. Of course, both are important, but to survive without water is very scary. It’s terrifying to be aloof, be it on a mental level or physical.”
The actor, who has played everything from saint to sinner, loves to challenge himself as long as it is not a health hazard. “As an actor, I love challenging myself. Of course, it’s not right to push yourself outside your limits. It should only be done under proper guidance. If a character demands something from me as an actor, I would love to go to an extreme to fulfill that demand. It’s my job and responsibility as an actor.”
