Home » Features » Vedaa: Nikkhil Advani's Film Doesn't Land The Sucker Punch It Aspires To

Features

Vedaa: Nikkhil Advani's Film Doesn't Land The Sucker Punch It Aspires To

<em>Vedaa</em> unravels as a showcase of John Abraham’s biceps, his brooding expressions and flexibility. More's the pity.

Ishita+Sengupta

Invalid date

Promotional still. Vedaa

IN NIKHIL ADVANI’s Vedaa a Dalit girl wants to learn boxing. It is not as much of a passion for her as it is a self-defence tool. In the small town of Rajasthan where she lives, even basic dignity is out of bounds. Upper-caste men freely make videos of her and the violation of privacy is so present and pervasive that she has stopped resisting. Amidst the adversity, boxing opens up as a leveller; an act of brute strength and agility that can help her win if not get even.

Vedaa comes after a line of films that have explored the sports in connection to caste. There is Pa Ranjith’s immense Sarpatta Parambarai (2021); there is also Anurag Kashyap’s terrific Mukkabaaz (2017). Advani does something entirely different with the correlation, in which he restrains from expounding even when the film starts off hinting at it. The bricks were all there. Vedaa (Sharvari) is a college-going student who is harassed by men, one of them being the younger brother of the village chief, Jitendar Pratap Singh (an effective Abhishek Banerjee). Discriminations are everywhere. She cannot drink from the same filter others do, she can’t get enrolled in boxing class like others do. This goes on till her brother’s love affair with an upper-caste girl is discovered and a kangaroo court is put in place that wrecks her whole family.

For a premise such as this, boxing opens up as the route to get back at the oppressors, a weapon of the marginalised to punch up after years of being punched down. But Vedaa is not that story. It is not about the protagonist’s retaliation, her resilience or even her fragility. Vedaa is not about Vedaa. The film instead is about Abhimanyu Kanwar (John Abraham), a court-martialled major who, after being removed from his post, comes to the same village as Vedaa, where his father-in-law lives.

Written by Aseem Arora Vedaa constantly feels like two films in one; the one it intended to be, and the other, what it unfolds as. There is a story about caste and its ramifications, which we don’t see, and there is a conventional depiction of caste and its ramifications that we do see. The gaze is constantly divorced from lived experience, which also explains why an upper caste man, Abhimanyu, becomes the saviour and hijacks the narrative.

As soon as he enters the picture, the story swiftly becomes about Abhimanyu. He is grieving the loss of his wife (who was killed by a Pakistani militant) and on seeing Vedaa’s eagerness for boxing, he decides to coach her. When the chase starts, he helps her escape. It is such a dense setting where the film, not once, pauses to reflect on his mindspace, of his awareness or blindspots. It assumes that Abhimanyu knows better because, inadvertently, he becomes the protagonist of the story.

During all this, Vedaa unravels as a showcase of Abraham’s biceps, his brooding expressions and flexibility. He kills 10 people at once; he just doesn’t shoot, he hammers them. He is as efficient as a machine. Advani gives the actor the chosen lines. When someone asks who he is, pat comes the reply: “tera baap”. The camera lingers on his inexpressive face as he finds inventive ways to beat up, maim and kill everyone around him. Vedaa resembles a sleek actioner here, one that has completely pushed the basic premise to the background. But it doesn’t even commit to this entirely. The outing keeps dangling before us the film it wants to be. Every 10 minutes a situation arises where the focus is on Vedaa’s face and she depicts a single-minded determination as though she is stepping into the ring. Just then, Abraham takes over and saves her all over again.

If one probes a little deeper, it makes sense. The actor is one of the producers and his intervention perhaps resulted in Vedaa becoming a showreel of his punches. It perhaps also explains why it opens in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. Technically and logically, there is no excuse for it except for the actor to look at a Pakistani terrorist and say, “Khuda bhi humare side hain (Even God is on our side)”. By the end of the long, overwrought second half, the film completely loses its bearings and, despite Sharvari’s committed turn, comes close to making a mockery of justice. A battle of bullets takes place in a high court but not a single police officer in sight. There is Abhimanyu though, an atheist with a God complex (his pet word is “tathastu”), who takes an awfully long time to die.