Yaara (Zee5)
Starring Vidyut Jammwal as Phagun, Shruti Haasan as Sukanya, Amit Sadh as Mitwa, Vijay Varma as Rizwan, Kenny Basumatary as Bahadur, Sanjay Mishra as Chaman
Directed by Tigmanshu Dhulia
Apart from some actors whom we trust to deliver on demand, there is nothing in Yaara to invest more than two hours of our time, in pursuit of some obscure political ideology where Naxals are the victims and the police are constantly brutal.
The film has graphic gruesome sequences of police torture. But nothing to compare with what we go throught sitting through a film that thinks dark is the colour that denotes the optimum depth.Little do they know.When all you can see is crime as a way out from oppression and joblessness for the young, then the social order needs a shake-up.This film doesn’t have the inner conviction to be a wake-up call for a social order based on discrimination. It puts violent oppression on screen, but gives no antidote to it.
Tigmanshu Dhulia’s film evidently adapted from a sub-standard French film (Les Lyonnais) builds its bitter harvest of bloodshed and brutality around the godforsaken lives of four friends. Phagun (Vidyut Jamwal) and Mitwa (Amit Sadh) are together from childhood. There are major lapses in continuity, so we really don’t know how Phagun and Mitwa reach puberty,adolescence and adulthood. The pair keeps hopping from one era to another. The period is created through sketchy references, like the death of singer Mukesh which pops up from nowhere.
The editor (Geeta Singh) seems to have had trouble putting the mess together in a semblance of coherence. The editing just crashes after a point, as we see Phagun and Mitwa clash and burn in a state of socio-economic intertia. They are later joined by two more friends Rizwan (Vijay Varma) and Bahadur (Kenny Basumatary). The four actors seem to have been given an identical directorial brief: act tough and macho, shoot guns like you’ve grown up watching Quentin Tarantino’s cinema and act conflicted for reasons that are comprehensible only to the director, if anyone at all.
Shruti Haasan is woefully miscast as a Naxal activist who gets all our heroes into some serious deathly trouble. She might as well have spared herself, and us, this ordeal. I came away from Yaara with neither a buddy-bonding flick nor a treatise on social inequality. I came away from a film where director, known to deliver powerful statements on socio-political issues, is just making the right noises for the sake of staying relevant. Dhulia is faking it here.
