“Shanghai”: The unattainable dream city

The title of my review of Dibakar Banerjee’s latest explains the title Shanghai that seems to elude most of its viewers. The title, indisputably, is far-fetched, and demands of the audience an awareness of the unattainable dreams Indian politicians are famed to peddle. Shanghai is the prototype city of the ultimate development human civilization can envisage at the present moment. So every Indian politician hawks this dream, unconscientiously; they are either oblivious of the predicament of several hundred people the realization of such a dream would entail, or they are simply not bothered. Dr. Ahmadi raises his voice against the brutality of such a project in a fictional Indian state, unimaginatively named Bharatnagar. He is assassinated, and the rest of the film, in a crime-thriller mode, is a search of the assassin. However, the viewer is all along aware who the real villain is. It is the characters, within the film, which has to arrive at the truth already available to the viewer. But, the film never once names the villain and attributes to the viewer such superior knowledge. The irony is the Indian viewer has grown so used to the corruption and evil practices of the State in general, that she can anticipate the end from the very beginning. 

If the end is already predictable from the very outset, why watch Shanghai? Why are people raving about the film? Is it really that great? I would say not quite. The film simply plays to the gallery, recounting and tying up into a single narrative political news that have been making headlines in the past few years in the media. Dr. Ahmadi (a glamorized, younger and suave version of Anna Hazare) is the tragic hero, the kind the nation badly needs at present. His socialist idealism, though undercut by his foreign university degree and teaching career, seeks to dismantle the general scene of aggressive capitalism in the post-global world. However, the popular version of progress that means approximating the dream technopolis, notwithstanding the quagmire such progress thrusts millions of less-privileged people into, barely changes.  

           

The film is realistic enough not to monger another dream of a better future. Rather it lays bare the atrocity of the lust for power, when Dr. Ahmadi’s widow enters into a pact with the political party that killed her husband, and contends the election. Although a responsible and honest government official resign, giving up on a prospective career, nothing changes eventually. In fact, in declaring “Shalini’s book on Dr. Ahmadi’s assassination was banned in India”, the film makes the viewer aware that she is acting voyeur to a forbidden narrative. The farce called democracy becomes all the more manifest in this declaration and the subsequent realization that dawns on the viewer. This is nothing new; official versions of history are mostly fabrications, and fiction has often intervened to relate true history. Shanghai performs the same function, reflecting on a pan-Indian reality at present.

If not for the content, the film is strongly recommended for its three mind-blowing performances: Imran Hashmi breaks new grounds as the porn filmmaker Jogi. With yellowed teeth and a bulging tummy, Imran steals the show with panache. Abhay Deol, who almost grows into the tie and the formal shirt, downplays his dimples to a startling effect to infuse credibility into the middle-class, idealistic, and serious Krishnan. Kalki’s is a passionate performance; she enacts with her eyes and body language what Shalini believes in. She would invariably remind of dedicated women freedom fighters strongly rooted in ideology. Prosenjit Chatterjee’s Dr. Ahmadi is a looker, indeed. But his forced Hindi is a downer. Banerjee could have very well made him a Bengali. Pitobash, Farooqh Sheikh and Supriya Pathak are near perfect.

           

Shanghai incidentally is smarting at the box-office under the onslaught of the agonizingly rowdy Rowdy Rathod. The postmodern lack of political and historical depth becomes ironically manifest in this. The GenY any day would give Shanghai a miss for a conventional garish Bollywood potboiler. Sad indeed! It barely matters whether Shalini’s book is banned or not! Nobody seems to care, right? 

Image Courtesy: apnaindia.com