“Serious
Men is a hilarious and satirical take on society and what we knew about it. A
man dealing with retrospects of
understanding the importance of education has aspirations of his child doesn’t needs
to deal with same situation, within his journey movie beautifully portrays his
experiences and relentless persuade of getting some form of notable Id in
society. Shading how every form of society like politician, servants , common
man warning for own survival and leading in favour of their own motives. “
The movie captures life
of blue-collar workers who are ridiculantly
told to when to give their perspective.
The lack of acknowledge of their sheer existence with the meanless case of
Nawazuddin. Bsed on Serious Men, the award-winning novel by Manu Joseph,
has some exquisitely cruel observations. Early in the story, the protagonist
Ayyan Mani deliberates ‘the secret moustaches of women,” and “the terrible
green freshness when they have been newly removed with a thread.” Ayyan
himself is described as “A dark, tidy man but somehow inexpensive.” The
book, published in 2010, is an unforgiving satire on contemporary India –
a twisted tale of ambition, fraud, caste, class, celebrity, infidelity,
politics and paternal love. Director Sudhir Mishra and writers Bhavesh
Mandalia, Abhijeet Khuman, Nikhil Nair and Niren Bhatt, reduce the sting
of the book. The result is a drama with a less curdled view of humanity.
The film is
designed to make you question but not to make you uncomfortable. It veers
between sharp and sagging, but ultimately Nawazuddin Siddiqui and the
terrific child actor Aakshath Das steer the story to a satisfying close.
Ayyan is a fascinating creation. He’s a bright man, keenly aware of his
place in the world. He’s the son of a sweeper, living in a chawl , who
works at a prestigious science institute. One of Ayyan’s most acerbic
conclusions is that it takes four generations to be able to sit by a pool
and do nothing. As he explains to his wife – they are 2G – second
generation. Educated but unable to enjoy themselves. Their son Adi will be
one step ahead with a corporate job and eventually Adi’s children – the
fourth generation - will have everything they desire. Ayyan is determined
to accelerate this evolution. He teaches himself English and then uses it
to penetrate the rarefied spaces of the upper-class, including fancy
five-star hotels. Fueled by a desperate desire to be more and have more,
Ayyan schemes and furiously manipulates everyone around him - from
his neighbor, who is a peon at the institute, to his boss, the venerated
space scientist Arvind Acharya, to his 10-year-old son, Adi. Which doesn’t
make Ayyan a villain because everyone else, irrespective of wealth or
status, is also hustling. A wily politician and his US-returned daughter
use Ayyan and Adi to push through their massive redevelopment
project. Acharya wants glory by finding microscopic aliens. Even the
principal of Adi’s school, a nun, tries to hard-sell Christianity to the
family. Basically, everything is for sale – including suffering. At one point,
Adi is posing for cameras, holdinga sign that reads: 100 percent Shuddh
Dalit.
In one of
the funniest scenes in the film,Ayyan masterfully plays the caste-card in
Adi’s school. He calls himself low caste and when the administrator he is
speaking to recoils awkwardly, Ayyan says: You can’t say it, but I can. In
a single line, he exposes the prejudice being cloaked by civility. It’s
deliciously wicked. The plot differs significantly from the novel. Acharya’s
extramarital affair with a colleague, which was a turning point in the book,
is reduced here to a footnote. The ending is changed and characters are
added. Not all the alterations work. The weakest is the father-daughter
politician duo. She gets a rudimentary backstory but neither has depth.
Ayyan’s barbed voice-over propels the narrative. His vocabulary, which includes
the wonderful fusion word chutiastic, is dazzling. But some of the dialogue is
awkward.
The
emotional core of the film is a lengthy, poignant conversation between Acharya
and Ayyan in an art gallery. At the end of which, Acharya says: Your angst
is right, but your actions are not. Who speaks like that? Sudhir and his
writers bung in twists, which complicate the plot but don’t further the
film. I couldn’t figure out the necessity of a thread involving the
neighbor and his daughter. But what keeps Serious Men on track is the
fraught relationship between Ayyan and Adi. The film veers slightly into
Breathe-series territory – how far would you go for your child? The
cynical scheming in Manu’s book is replaced by the tortured grief of a
father who only wants a better life for his son. And who can grudge him
that? Especially when he is played with such full-bodied delight by Nawazuddin
Siddiqui. Ayyan is duplicitous and downright awful , but Nawazuddin
doesn’t allow us to judge him.
Ayyan
is simply a product of the grotesque world we live in. Watch Nawazuddin’s
controlled expressions in the art gallery scene, in which he recounts his
past. The horror hits home. Aakshath also does the heavy lifting. He doesn’t
overplay Adi’s trauma, which makes it more heartbreaking. Nassar effortlessly
becomes Acharya, the voice of reason and authority. And Indira Tiwari as
Ayyan’s wife Oja, is well-cast. There's wisdom and weariness on her face –
she’s smart enough to understand that her husband isn’t always smart.
Looming large over these characters is the BDD Chawl –15,000 people
crammed into 21 blocks. The chawl is a concrete embodiment of all that
traps Ayyan, his family and everyone who lives there – caste, education,
money, opportunities. DOP Alexander Surkala captures the claustrophobia of
the one-room tenements, but he also gives the spaces a dream-like quality.
In one scene, Ayyan, furious and frustrated, frees the birds caged on the
common terrace of the chawl . But unlike them, he needs to do much more to
take flight. In Serious Men, Sudhir finds the sweet spot between intricacy,
starkness and emotion. There is enough material here for a sequel in which
Ayyan Mani runs the world. And I have no doubt that he can. You can watch
Serious Men on Netflix India.
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