Despatch: Manoj Bajpayee Shoulders This Dense Drama

DESPATCH is Kanu Behl’s most accessible film. For any other filmmaker, this would not mean too much but Bahl’s filmography is built on opaqueness that stings with rage. His last few outings, including Titli (2014) and the unreleased Agra, are tethered to a sense of decay that leaks into the characters' souls and distances them from the people watching them. Despatch extends this aesthetic but culminates as a film that frustrates more than alienates.

The reason might be attributed to the presence of Manoj Bajpayee. There is hardly a bad Bajpayee performance but his craft does something else. It imbues a sense of empathy for the characters making them bearable if not likeable. The assumption is stretched to the limits in Despatch where he plays Joy Bag, a crime reporter for a newspaper in Mumbai. He is well-known and respected at his job, yet he is rotten to the core. The signs are easy to discern. A veteran journalist, he chases after his stories and freely manipulates cops and sources alike. The mask falls off in close quarters, revealing him to be an ageing, insecure man with a roving eye.

He is estranged from his wife (Shahana Goswami) and although the reason is never explicitly mentioned, it is easy to see that he has weaponised her supposed rift with his family for his personal gains. He is writing a book but the one doing the work is Prerna (Arrchita Agarwaal), a junior writer he is also sleeping with on the sides. Here too the lines are blurred. The age difference suggests that she used to probably idolise him and he exploited the power equation with promises of love and marriage.

Joy is a deeply flawed man and Bajpayee is gallantly committed to it. His mannerisms and physicality are aligned with the character who reserves his true self from everybody, especially himself. Work for him is a source of passion, an unending site of validation that allows him to sidestep shortcomings. Behl stages these moments smartly. He crumbles when a gangster overpowers and hits him and yet within the precincts of a police station, it is Joy who unleashes the attack. When he is taunted by Prerna for getting old, he scurries off with violence to chase a lead. Being a journalist is both his chosen battle and his armour.

Written by Behl and Ishani Banerjee, Despatch is most effective as an eroding portrait of masculinity that needs constant propping up to showcase bravado. Joy’s character is clearly, if loosely, modelled on the late Mid-Day journalist Jyotirmoy Dey, yet Behl resists infusing the character with any posthumous glory. Through the story of a decrepit journalist, Despatch also wants to tell the story of the decomposing state of journalism in India. The year is 2012 and the sense of premonition is strong.

The parallel makes sense given Joy is but a product of the system and the newspaper he works for is on the verge of digital revolution and a takeover. But the equivalence rings false given how dense Despatch feels as it unfolds. Certain clues are on paper. Joy is tracking a high-profile scam which has arms into high-end business, cricket and entertainment. The film remains strangely obtuse about the details as if only the outline matters. In a way it does, given how familiar most of it feels but the withholding also implies that the specifics are irrelevant.

But Bahl’s film is so thick with resentment against the system that it overpowers everything else. For instance, it is well attuned to the follies of Joy yet the characters around him, especially the women, are never given a chance to rise above the footnotes that they were reduced to. In a way, although Despatch reserves its indictment for Joy it also adapts his gaze. The staging of the sex scenes, especially, is evidence of it.

Having said that, Despatch also opens a pathway to engage and wrestle with it which feels both new and necessary. Bajpayee’s face comes up recurrently as one probes, aiding and hindering the reading. The actor shoulders the film, assuaging and reflecting our discomfort of being privy to a world of newsrooms where nothing is what it seems.

Despatch is currently streaming on ZEE5.