Jaago - Review

Starring Sanjay Kapoor, Raveena Tandon & Manoj Bajpai
Directed by Mehul Kumar.
Rating : *1/2

Rape is a heinous crime. The rape of a child is an even worse crime. But to watch a loud brakeless film on the subject us worse. Fortunately for producer-director Mehul Kumar his film on the gangrape of a 9-year old school girl knows where to stop before it’s accused of trying to win salacious points .

Jaago purports to be wake-up call for a a somnolent desensitised nation of people who believe crime has nothing to do with them …. even if it comes knocking on their doors. Hence when little Shruti(Hansika Motwani) is brutalized by 3 drugged freakos on a local train in Mumbai, a woman , her daughter and a old man are mute spectators.

Mehul Kumar has earlier issued reel-wrapped wake -up calls for our collective social conscience in Tirangaa and Krantiveer where Nana Patekar sermonized the castrated masses so hard they had to be startled into an awakened state.

Since Jaago deals with the most sensitive social crime in the book of atrocities one expected Mehul Kumar’s tone of narration to be less screechy . Jaago is as violent and aggressive in tone as Kumar’s earlier films. Dialogue writer K.K Singh gets plenty of opportunities for rhetorical gymnastics in the courtroom. Even when the characters aren’t in a session they talk as they though they are in an invisible courtroom .

Forget mainstay….the dialogues are the maim-stay of this jarringly jingotsic journey into crime reportage. Then there’s the background score. Last week in Maqbool Vishal Bhardawaj showed us how an effective background score can reveal the torn and tortured world of the characters. In Jaago Sameer Sen’s background score is like an invitation to a rock video . The notes don’t fall….they hurl down on the verbose soundtrack. The score includes the sounds of crowing crows each time a corrupt lawyer saunters in(kaala coat and kaala kauwaa?) and the carefully copyrighted and patented ‘Happy Birthday To You’ tune.

It’s fortunate that there are no songs in the narrative. Between Sen’s over-the-top(and how!) backgrounder and the loud K.K Singh-sound, there isn’t room for a breath of fresh air , let alone a song.

Songlessness by itself cannot be counted as a virtuous leap-forward for a filmmaker. For all practical purposes Mehul Kumar continues to play the role of the clamorous crusader. Apart from a sequence with one of the rapists’ mother where she derides her son for his ghastly crime, and a sardonic chief minister’s venomous ironical diatribe against the crime when one of the rapists’ bureaucrat-father tries to pull powerful strings to save his son, there isn’t one laudably subtle and thoughtprovoking moment of social comment .

Where Mehul Kumar needed an ampoule he opts for a barrel. Loud and belligerent in tone, Jaago fails to get across the enormity of the crime against child with even a reasonable amount of conviction. We should’ve been one with the bereaved parents, Raveena Tandon and Sanjay Kapoor’s, unspeakable grief at the rape and death of their child. The minute Raveena gets into "seductive" clothes to trap her daughter’s rapists in the same railway compartment(with the same witnesses looking on!) the narrative plunges with Raveena’s neckline, never to rise above the level of a street play on crime against women.

Yes, but what about crimes against moviegoers? Severely handicapped by a script that projects hamhanded situations through characters who simulate seriousness rather than absorb and feel the immensity of the subject, Jaago is worth watching only for Manoj Bajpai’s restrained take on a cop’s repulsed rejection of departmental inertia and corruption. It’s interesting to see how different this cop is from the one Bajpai played in Shool. The outraged indignation of the earlier crimebuster is now frozen into a steely determination to rid society of scum before it’s too late.

The character’s idealism, though affective, gets submerged in tons of outrageous scenes and dialogues. When a corrupt cop whisks away the eyewitnesses to the crime our cop-hero kidnaps his colleague’s wife and child! Then there’s the alarming and throughly unbecoming differentiation between the Bad Criminal and Good Criminal . Puru Raj Kumar makes a belated appearance as jailed gangster who ‘approves’ of the rapists being punished by extra-constitutional methods.

As if anyone’s asking! One of the offenders is murdered by the raped girl’s mother, another by the father and the third is hanged by the cop-hero while the parents and other members of the fury watch with smug satisfaction.

Rape finally finds its level. Now we can sleep peacefully.