Jawan and the art of marrying mass appeal with message film

Jawan’s premise apes a long list of vigilante films that suggest that only by shaking the foundational principles of society can you really push it towards a reckoning. (Image via Twitter)

There is a sequence in the last half of Shah Rukh Khan’s Jawan, when he breaks the fourth wall and urges the audience to consider the pivotal act of casting a vote. The sequence is preceded by the provocation that the country’s entire stock of EVM machines has been robbed. It is followed by a typical, perhaps even off-topic, personal bout between Khan and Vijay Sethupathi (Kaali) that predictably ends with the former’s victory. In between these set pieces, Jawan shifts goalposts and political antecedents. A passive republic, one uninterested in curing itself of disaffection, our protagonist suggests, is as culpable as the men who then monetize its anguish. You can hammer such men into physical submission but to erase them, one must first avenge the human conscience. Question before cultivating a desire for answers.

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Jawan’s premise apes a long list of vigilante films that suggest that only by shaking the foundational principles of society can you really push it towards a reckoning. It’s Joker, but mellower; A Wednesday, but seductive. Khan who plays a guise-changing vigilante (Azad and Vikram Rathore) reprimands the men in power by forcing them to come to the table. He hijacks a train, to get a minister to address agrarian distress. He consigns the health minister to a hospital that, as per his own claim, should represent help but is merely another version of dire, dehumanizing hell. Azad’s own origin story, much like Rang De Basanti, underlines the fraught nature of incentivized conflict. Weapons can be bought, but the lives that hang by them, can’t. Jawan, Kisaan and Vigyaan, as Atal Bihari Vajpayee attested to Lal Bahadur Shastri’s clarion call, thus symbolize the backbone of an assertive civilization.

Atlee’s direction, the many heroic entries of Khan that he choreographs are dizzying corsages that represent his legend. They function as gifts to people for whom the actor’s storied career now fits the framing device of pulpy, mass cinema. Khan used to spread his arms and invite people in. He now walks in, cigar in mouth, vengefully wiping the screen with faces and cracked jaws. But none of this pulpous, giddy affirmation of machismo would mean a thing without earning for it a political pulpit to speak from. A stage that has to first be created by either seductive design or sensitizing grammar. While Jawan uses the former, the latter Khan employed in films like Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani, Swades and Chak! De India. In his own mercurial way, he has always been more political than people give him credit for.

But politics can’t simply be dumped onto the scaffolding of a film in the blank hope that it will attach itself to the stardom. In Jawan, pain and grief are itemized through the women Khan’s act collaborates with. One is the surviving daughter of a farmer who claimed his life, another the doctor wrongfully accused of a medical catastrophe. Another is the survivor of an environmental disaster reminiscent of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. Unless you view these faces of tragedy, the film argues, you can’t quite regard yourself as the witness of the aggravation it consequences in. The practicality of suffering, it’s unconditional self-expression, does more than any headline or any chapter stuffed away in a cold book could. Only agony, unfortunately, can serve as the syntax of appeal. The lecture at the end of it all is merely the signature.

Merging message with massy cinema is a tricky balancing act. It’s even more difficult when you want to spread that angst around, dig your nails into several crumbling walls that the unimpressed gaze passes by as matter of routine. And so Jawan builds its action, its set-pieces around its arguments. Arguments that broadly speak about accountability, but also about the intimate act of empathizing. Not until we humanize the subjects, can the objective nature of governance and administration be analysed. The two cannot exist at the expense of the other. Bullishly, Atlee’s film also posits each victim as the prologue to heroism that despite its stylish nature, is reluctant in the making. Heroism that the film’s larger-than-life protagonist claims, wouldn’t be needed should we all do the bare minimum and think. i.e. Jawan is the film we need, not the one we deserve.

Mainstream cinema doesn’t trade subtlety as much as it sacrifices it. Politics thus appears in a rudimentary form, punctuated not by bureaucratic complexity but by emotive syllogisms. In Jawan, tears roll down cheeks with frightening ease and regularity. To the festival atmosphere of everything else, it’s the only restrictive sign of misery. To the violence, it’s the only touch of modesty; to the journey of provocation, it’s the easily accessible base camp of motive. From here the hike is as loud and crass as the nature of politics it is trying to summit. The apple of reform doesn’t fall far from the tree of tradition. It takes a larger-than-life hero, arriving again and again over the course of a 3-hour film, to remind us that he is always on the way. Much like the election that happens every five years. It’s hope via surrender.