All India Rank: A Whimsical Ode To Youth, & Parents Coming Of Age

FEW things are as misrepresented in Hindi films as youth. The specificity of the time often gets drowned out by the excess of depiction. The aimlessness of the age gets consumed by the adult gaze and reluctance is coloured as disobedience. Filmmakers are prone to lending a distinct clarity to adolescence, forgetting often that of all the things young adults are, being a drifter is their primary trait. Varun Grover’s debut feature film, All India Rank is a whimsical slice-of-life film that unfolds sidestepping this pitfall. 

When Vivek Singh (Bodhisattva Sharma), a teenager in Lucknow, is sent to Kota for IIT tuitions, he is crestfallen. His face shrinks and he holds the jar of sweets made by his mother, with all his might. In the train he pulls out a cassette and plugs his walkman. The image is so familiar that I instinctively started looking for a reason. Maybe he liked someone and is leaving them behind? Maybe his school friends sent that cassette as a souvenir of the time they spent together? But my expectation was a result of watching this moment play out a certain way in films. Grover, admirably, looks at it without the filter of past depictions. Vivek’s sadness has no greater subtext than his unwillingness to leave home. He is too young to reckon with the implications, something his mother understands. She tearfully tells her husband, responsible for the move, that their nest will be permanently empty now. He will join college and later take up a job. Vivek will keep coming back home without a homecoming. 

The narrative too mimics the languidness of the age. After struggling a little to adjust, Vivek makes friends, Chandan (Neeraj), Rinku (Ayush Pandey) and Sarika (Samta Sudiksha). They open up to each other and spend their idle time cycling, or sharing what they want to become (Vivek is clueless). There is an honesty to their interaction, imbued but not shackled by shyness. A lot of this has to do with the time the narrative it posited in. Set during the 90s’, All India Rank unravels as a reassuring time capsule, a throwback to when youth was not held hostage by technology. The upshots are a mixed bag. When Vivek spreads two magazines, carefully chosen for a self-serving purpose, the moment is disrupted by load shedding. When his mother, who sits at a PCO, calls him, their conversations are often interjected with the minutes they have spoken. 

Grover looks at the past but to his merit, his gaze is driven by nostalgia but not softened by it. The narrative is spread between Lucknow, where Vivek’s low-rung government-officer father RK Singh (a terrific Shashi Bhushan whose turn is reminiscent of Kumud Mishra in the best possible way) and mother (an impressive Geeta Agrawal Sharma) live, and in Kota where his student life was taking shape (Sheeba Chaddha plays the teacher). There is a gentle incisiveness to his vision, which reimagines the past without blindly recreating them. The most memorable instances in the outing are when the writer Grover comes through. 

Like when a senior tells Vivek that Diana has died and he should be careful. “Why?” he asks. “The world is unkind to pretty people and you are pretty,” comes the reply. Or the time Vivek’s classmate, who had hitherto maintained that he didn’t study, scores well. When his aggrieved batchmates ask why he lied, the young boy says that he aspires to be like Shah Rukh Khan in Darr and not in Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa, a statement unfit in the woke lingo. 

But his evocation of the time also carries the demand to be noticed. Most filmmakers tend to do that. The camera falls on an old calculator, an archaic poster highlighting the labour of the research. Even in All India Rank, we see a beverage cooler stamped with the word, “Citra”, a soft drink brand that was sold in India during the 1980s and till the 1990s. Vivek rides a typified hero ranger cycle. These details are not just there but want to be seen. Even the visual language that often breaks into animation feels heavy-handed. 

This is not to say none of this works. When they meld into the narrative, the results are affecting. Like a familiar Sachin Tendulkar poster in Vivek’s room, a sight shared by most 90s’ kids. Or the fact that an unruly boy in the neighbourhood uses the alias of Shawn Michaels, the famed wrestler, to disturb girls. That most of them are included in the Lucknow bit further contributes to the remarkability of this stretch. It is also aided by how brilliant both Bhushan and Sharma are, their faces vivid through emotional turmoil. 

Perhaps this accounts for the biggest achievement of a film like All India Rank, which appears primed to be a regular UPSC aspirant story but ends up as a moving account of a middle-aged couple. There are these little moments like the fact that RK Singh, suspended from his workplace for an inadvertent error, carries none of the bitterness home. He consoles his wife when she is morose and freely breaks into a Shaktimaan gig to cheer her up. When she is stressed, he quickly washes a sweet and feeds her. Afflicted with high pressure, she is forbidden to have sugar but he knows what her heart wants. In a story about youth and aimlessness, it is the parents who come of age.