It is very likely that the story told in Madhur Bhandarkar's latest film India Lockdown is one that every single Indian has known all along, and experienced firsthand in the last two years as a result of government-imposed national lockdowns in the wake of the transmission of the novel coronavirus.
Watching the film is akin to revisiting the horrors of the lockdown when life came to a standstill and everyone became a victim of their own vulnerabilities.
Bhandarkar picks up four scenarios with five different sets of people, blows up their stories and presents to the audience the trials and tribulations experienced by the characters, how each of their lives are suddenly and very profoundly impacted by extended lockdowns which at that time, felt as if they won't ever end.
There is a sex worker (Shweta Basu Prasad) who cribs that her business has been gravely hit by the lockdown and so, she decides to try phone sex to keep her income going. A debt-ridden food-cart operator (Prateik Babbar) and his wife (Sai Tamhankar) who works as a housemaid, decide to walk back to their native village in Bihar along with their two little children—a stark reminder of India's migrant crisis, when so many of them set out for their village on foot, in the absence of work and shelter in the cities they lived in. A father in his 60s (Prakash Belawadi) is held back from meeting his expecting daughter in another city because of strict interstate curfews, and so he prepares to drive all the way. A female pilot (Aahana Kumra) represents the 'Instagram-friendly lockdown life,' for many upper and middle-class Indians who found themselves holed up inside their homes and took to learning new skills, mainly cooking. Because these are stories of people from different strata of society, they manage to appeal to everyone, but the stories themselves fail to keep us hooked for long.
Yes, there are moments that move us, especially the desperation and despair of the migrant family and the helplessness of the elderly father who finds himself cooped up alone in his home, desperate to reach his pregnant daughter. But all the scenes appear staged and dramatised to the point that they seem unconvincing.
The film seems to have been made in a rush, as if someone has desperately tried to weave disjointed stories together and has done it in a haphazard and half-hearted way. While each sub-text or sub plot is rich in itself, given that it delivers content, emotion and drama, it fails in the face of the larger whole. For instance, it is commendable that crucial aspects related to morality have been highlighted, such as when an influential politician uses an ambulance to satisfy his lust at a time when there is a severe shortage of ambulances, or when a sex worker rescues an underage girl and sends her home even at the cost of facing flak from her handlers. But the film as a whole simply moves on frame to frame without establishing a sort of seamless connect. Given that this is a narrative which the audience has actually experienced first-hand, one is bound to feel that the script deserved much more than simply scraping the surface of a past that haunts many of us even today.
India Lockdown cast: Prakash Belawadi, Prateik Babbar, Shweta Basu Prasad, Sai Tamhankar, Aahana Kumra, Zarin Shihab
India Lockdown director: Madhur Bhandarkar
India Lockdown rating: 1.5/5