Movies like Peepli Live and Gabhricha Paus have handled the subject of farmer suicide with great sensitivity, and the stories they told have had a lasting impact in the hearts and minds of the audience.
Mere Desh ki Dharti seems to have similar ambitions. It starts with two out-of-job engineers attempting to kill themselves, failing and then leaving the big bad city on a train. They get kicked off the train for being ticketless, and find themselves in a village. The two finally find redemption when they save farmers' lives.
A good concept on paper. But when Piyush Mishra gets clever with words (mentioning movie songs to create rhyming dialogue like ‘Choodi nahi mera dil hai, aa gayi hamari manzil hai’), you wish it were a podcast rather than film.
Now Piyush Mishra is an otherwise wonderful writer, and you see flashes of brilliance in the reminiscing: din bade huye aur ummeed choti (as days became longer, hope shrinks), but the film tries too hard to be comical and gives us flashbacks of Shirish Kunder’s Joker where villagers do outlandish things to save their village.
But this story is totally unfunny. Why is Pappan Khan dressed like a bandmaster? Why is he dressed in an outlandish leather jacket and very urban sneakers? Why is he combing his wig funny? Why does he have an old blind granny who talks out of context? If all the young men have gone away from the village and the old farmers are too old to farm, how is the seed shop run by Dubeyji (played by Brijendra Kala) making a profit? Why does Rajesh Sharma play a double role?
The film then ends up being poor man’s Swades where the two engineers from Mumbai teach farmers the value of cooperative farming. In a country where Duryodhan declared that he would not give away land that’s equal to a needle point and where every son would have instantly been back if they knew their old man was giving land away, why the people give these two their land with so much alacrity is unbelievable.
Plus the makers forgot how thousands of farmers protested against laws that scrapped the ‘mandi’ (marketplace where small farmers bring their produce to sell), as that’s what happens in this movie. The laws have been repealed and yet the filmmakers seem to bow their proverbial heads to a government agenda. I am amazed that one of the young men agrees to the condition put forward by the big company: marry my daughter and only then will I buy the grain. Erm… What conditions do big companies offer farmers if there is no daughter that can be married off to the young man…
The two engineer saviours are then interviewed by Annu Kapoor on a TV show that is an excuse to spout more propaganda. By this time you are too drained to wonder where this poor village got a harvester combine to harvest their produce or was it just footage taken from Punjab…You feel despair for young actors like Divyendu (Pyaar Ka Punchnama, Mirzapur) and Anant Vidhaat (Sultan, Gunday) who should read the script before agreeing to such faux patriotic films.
A small movie called Jhing Chik Jhing did a better job telling the story of farmers suicides than this loud, illogical movie.
And if you want to feel patriotic and be moved to tears of pride, watch this song from Upkar (which inspired the title of this film) instead:
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