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EDITOR'S PICK
`John Day`: taut, tense, tactile and
terrific (IANS Hindi Film Review)
Rating: ***
This is no place for the weak. This world as we know it. And this film, as we
discover with the thrill of chancing upon an unexpected little gem.
Inspired from a Spanish film, is it? I really don't give a fig where
writer-director Ahishor Solomon got the raw material for this gripping
cat-and-mouse tale. Does the kitchen where the food on the table originates
really mean anything? What counts is the quotient of curiosity and suspense
simulated by the script. And there, "John Day" ranks very high.
Not for a while have we seen a film so steeped in despair, so swathed in
anxiety, so audaciously draped in despair and yet it engages our senses without
miring the plot in morbidity.
The story is not for the squeamish. The two main characters are constantly
haunted by their irrevocably tragic parts. Naseeruddin Shah and Randeep Hooda,
real-life guru and pupil, play people who know no happiness. Incidents from
their past continue to shadow and chase their present. There is scarcely a
moment in the plot when John (Shah) and Gautam (Hooda) are happy except when
they are with their beloved 'Other'.
But then Shernaz Patel, who plays Naseer's wife and the very beautiful foreigner
Elena Kazan who plays Randeep girl are troubled by their own ghosts. So where do
we go for comfort?
What price, solace?
"John Day" is a restless edgy drama of the doomed and the damned. This
not the first time Randeep has played a fugitive shadowed by his own past.But
this is certainly his most layered character which he performs with the kind of
gravelly gusto that allows us to get only as close to the sullen character as he
wants us. Towards the end-game when the momentum gets frenzied beyond
recuperation, Randeep's character's softer side emerges.
He has a brilliantly written monologue with a comatose character where we get to
know how much this brutal man loves his woman.
Yup, this man can die for money and for love. It's a dichotomous character torn
between self-abnegation and vendetta.
In a way Randeep character plays a mirror-image of Naseer's banker gone amok.
This is not the first time that India's most vaunted actor has played a wizened
common man pushed to a corner by the monstrous corruption in out socio-political
system.
Remember Neeraj Pathak's "A Wednesday"? Here In "John Day"
the terror that Naseer's character battles is far more personal, and hence in
many ways, much more moving and compelling. His greatness as an actor doesn't
come in the way of letting the character of the common man have his say in the
most natural way possible.
It is very difficult to speak out openly about the characters and their
motivations without giving away the plot. "John Day" is the kind of
clenched yarn that makes you forget that yawning distance between cinema and the
audience. You become one with the character's battles, without getting
judgemental over their actions.
Some of the things that the characters do are unmistakably brutal. An innocent
woman's head is shattered by a hammer, a man's tongue is bitten off and another
man's neck is also bitten off. It's a cold brutal world with no comic relief, at
least none where you laugh out loud at the ironies of life.
"John Day" brings the indomitable Naseeruddin and the intriguing
Randeep for a taut cat-and-mouse chase that stays a step ahead of the audience
right till the shattering end-game.
While the two principal actors get under their characters' skins, other actors
seem equally at home in this inky kingdom of greed and gluttony. Vipin Sharma
and Makrand Despande are very engaging in their supporting parts. They make doom
seem anything but dull. But the film's third hero is Sandeep Chowta's background
score. It creates a world of emotions beyond the spoken words for Naseer and
Randeep.
This is a world where there is no escape from sorrow and grief. Enemies are
clobbered and butchered mercilessly. Not because they deserve to die. But
because life is as randomly brutal as we make it for ourselves. And cinema such
as this reminds us that moral values of good, evil, justice and comeuppance mean
nothing to those who have nothing to lose.
For a film about losers "John Day" proves to be a paradoxically
profitable movie-viewing experience for the audience.
From the producer of ‘A Wednesday’ comes an edge-of-the-seat thriller, ‘John Day’, starring Naseeruddin Shah and Randeep Hooda. Within every saint there is a beast hidden and behind every beast there is a story. Few circumstances in life can bring out the beast within you. The thin line which separates the saint and the beast, the good and evil is going to be blurred and broken forever. Directed by Ahishor Solomon and produced by Anjum Rizvi, K Asif and Aatef A Khan, the film releases worldwide on 13th September, 2013