Badlapur, like Revenge,is Cathartic & Meaningless (at the same time)

I am an avid Bollywood film goer; I even founded and led one of the largest film studios in India, producing/distributing a breathtaking spectrum of genres, from Singh Is King to Queen to That Girl In Yellow Boots.

But I have never ever commented on a Bollywood film, either as a critic, reviewer or plain watcher.

Yesterday I watched Badlapur. Besides being an outstanding film, I found it an unusual take on human behavior, at once complex and unpredictable, a bit like the intense, twisted fare on Oscar-winning Hollywood cinema.

It reminded me of an old Urdu couplet that my father would hum on a ghazal-filled, alcohol laced, smoked up winter evening in Ajmer: jise log kehtey hain zindagi, woh toh haadson ka hujoom hai. Loosely transliterated, it means that people may believe life is ordained by a complex chemistry, but actually, it is just happenstance, a collection of chance incidents.

Badlapur opens on just one such happenstance. A stunning few minutes of stifled sounds, wrapped over the mundane nothingness of a regular morning on a busy street in Pune. While several things are happening in the frame, all of them are utterly routine and inconsequential – a policeman towing a wrongly parked car, people hurrying to work, a mom and her boy hopping and skipping happily across a break in the traffic. And then the haadsa happens, and zindagi gets sucked into an unexpected hujoom.

Most of the characters are swathed in grey. They are good and bad, lucky and unfortunate, their miseries often deserved, often unearned. The successful do-gooder who is so consumed by tragic revenge that he becomes a psychopath; the charming wastrel with a criminal streak who becomes an unwitting murderer, who can see the right even when he is so wrong; the episodic robber trying to efface his blighted past; and a prostitute with a heart of 18, not 24, carat gold (she was a bit of old Bollywood cardboard, as was the wastrel’s mother’s character, but what the heck; vamps and mothers are allowed to be exceptions, for after all, film ko bikna bhi toh hai).

While every role has purple/grey etchings, two women protagonists are lily white. These two young ladies are pretty, charming, morally upright and doting/sacrificing wives – in fact, the epitome of bhartiya naari. And yet both meet brutal, bloody death, for no rhyme or reason or crime – just happenstance, just caught up in haadson ka hujoom. It’s a compelling portrayal of the randomness of life and (mis)fortune.

The ending is sieved into a scrap of stilted morality (film ko bikna bhi toh hai). In a straight dialogue, the “hero” is told about the futility of revenge. But if we were to obliterate this blip, then the denouement stays seared well after the film is over:

Revenge is, at the same time, cathartic and meaningless. If you don’t take revenge, you die an unrequited death; but if you do take revenge, you live an unrequited life.

Go watch it for yourself. Perhaps you will find other meanings in the film’s layered narrative.