Sehar

Watched Sehar (2005) which has been recommended strongly ever since its release by many friends time and again. Indeed it makes a lot of difference that the film revisits Shriprakash Shukla's mythical rise and fall, which I lived through thanks to the newspaper. The film is a dramatic, commercial, but sincere, and somewhat meticlous attempt to narrate what surely was an astounding story. The film has several weaknesses though, the most glaring being Sushant Singh whose pale performance of a cold blood murderer just does not take off.

More curiously, however, the film propagates an alternative idealism of the pragmatic variety. Even though deeply rooted in melodramatic polarisation of good and evil, it explicitly rewrites the code of idealism by giving it the 'drift' of a pragmatic encounter-morality. Surely the film came in the heydays of Bollywood's steamy affair with encounter-cops of great variety. Also, while Satya began in 98 and Company followed up on the mobile telephony's radical alteration of the infoscape, Sehar documents the other side of the story - police using mobile telephony as a tool to track. Interesting but overdone, I would say. The end disappoints to some extent, but the film remains gripping and tense throughout, therefore directed reasonably well by a debutant.

The most amazing moment in the film - almost a counter-moment that undercuts the visuals with its absence - is the instance when one of the STF members drives Pankaj Kapur home late night and you know as a trained bollywood spectator that Pankaj Kapur is going to get killed by the STF member who will change side adding a predictable 'twist'. By not taking that trajectory Kabeer, the director, plays a cute trick on Bollywood spectatorship without doing anything outlandish.