Joram Movie Review — Sucharita Tyagi
The last time Manoj Bajpayee starred in a movie by writer-director Devashish Makhija, he won the Best Actor Award at the Film Critics Guild of India AND a National Award.
That was 2018’s incredible Bhonsle. What do they have for you now?
Manoj Bajpayee is Dasru. A migrant worker working in Mumbai on daily wages, along with his wife, played by Tannishtha Chatterjee. They have a 3-month-old daughter named Joram, and all of them live in the very under-construction building they are working on. While it looks like this could be the story of any 1 of the millions of daily wage laborers living with next to no means, with our protagonist, there is more than meets the eye. Dasru has a secret so dangerous, he’s almost too scared to say it out loud to himself.
Within a few scenes we are told Dasru was a member of a rebel alliance in Jharkhand, but in an attempt to flee the life of violence and murder, has fled his village. His past life though, unbeknownst to him, is slowly catching up. Some people break into his makeshift home, a murder takes place, and Dasru has no recourse but to flee once again, now with an infant in a sling. This time he is being chased by the police, a local leader from his village, and his conscience.
This is not the first time Devashish Makhija has attempted to tell the story of rebels from Jharkhand. His compassion for and curiosity about India’s tribals forced to pick up arms when all systems fail them was displayed with even more of a burning passion in his 2021 short film Cycle, which incidentally had also picked up awards organized by India’s Film Critics Guild. Dono movies, Cycle and Joram ke trailers feature a similar tribal ditty being sung by a woman, in happier times. The Cycle was a “found footage” format film, with a female protagonist looking for revenge in anger, Joram is Makhija’s full-fledged defense of India’s indigenous communities, swindled out of their ancestral lands by corporations hand in glove with local governments.
This time, his protagonist is not angry, despite having EVERY reason to be furious at the world. Dasru is post-anger. His flame has been put out. When we meet him for the first time, he has already given up the cause, content with living an impoverished life, as long as he is left alone and can live safely. Dasru has accepted defeat, his dreams are all deflated, and is only living from one sunrise to the next for the sake of his newborn. At the hands of a lesser actor, this would have been almost tedious to watch, but the compelling magic of Manoj Bajpayee holds you by the scruff of your neck with ferocity, even when his on-screen character is anything but ferocious.
As a rebel, his group’s weapon of choice occasionally would be a wooden slat with nails hammered into it for use as a medieval club-like torturing device. But now when we meet him, he scrounges for wooden blocks discarded at his construction site, takes out the nails already beaten into them and proceeds to burn the wood in a fire to cook food on. The symbolism is heartbreaking. He does t have the luxury of simply leaving his old life behind, he must actively burn it.
But once Dasru is on the run, the only option left to him is to make his way back to the place where this story began, in the hopes of closure. For a companion he has little Joram, in some sense both equally ill-equipped to face the world.
The film is watching you watch it and doesn’t want to be blamed for presenting a one-sided, incomplete narrative. While Dasru runs and hides, the narrator shifts and for large swaths of time, we become Ratnakar, the police officer reluctantly giving him chase, played effortlessly by an always excellent Mohammed Zeeshan Aayub. Just like the man he is being made to hunt, all Ratnakar ALSO wants to do go home. When he gets to Dasru’s village, the film’s true intentions emerge, once again Makhija wants to go to the genesis of the lawlessness one hears about in certain parts of the country. If minors are being imprisoned for carrying their traditional bow and arrows, are the laws themselves not responsible for turning them into criminals? Something shifts in Ratnakar when he sees a tribal police officer, played by an incredible Jacky Bhavsar, made to dress like a woman and dance for his colleagues, not as a joke, but a proper production that’s clearly been going on for a while. Ratnakar is slowly realizing this posting isn’t going to be as straightforward as he had thought, and to do his job right, he must find the cause of this effect.
To further the attempt to give an even more comprehensive, but pointedly focused look at the issue at hand, Joram also speaks about the tribals turning on each other, but very carefully without vilifying them for doing so. As industrialization forces more and more farmers to sell their land for a pittance and move to the city, and the village descends into lawlessness, would you rather kill or be killed? Smita Tambe as Phulo Karma is the politican who chooses the first option. As the first tribal elected politician, she is in too deep, and in the corrupt systems she must operate within, amassing power by whatever means necessary, is her only option, even if it means she loses a little more respect for herself every day. The main antagonist is a woman. Who knows what horrors forced her to move over to the dark side?
Makhija’s screenplay leads up to a breathtaking chase sequence, with multiple parties in various modes of transport looking for each other in the climax. Ratnakar is on a bike, Phulo in her sarkaari jeep and Dasru clinging onto the stepney of a car, child on the back. The ultimate sequence then takes place in a huge mine. Tiny, dwarfed humans against hollowed-out stony mountains, trying to ascertain their might with hulking machinery. A face-off occurs, Phulo with her power is in the passenger seat, Dasru meek and timid in the back, Ratnakar at the window, slightly unsure, lacking full context, still looking in from the outside. Unlike Article 15, there will be no heroic save of the “downtrodden”, no solutions by city dwellers, no solutions at all.
Like Scorsese with Killers Of The Flower Moon, Devashish Makhija too has a guilt he’s trying to assuage through his writing. Why do WE get to live in Mumbai high-rises, why do we sleep soundly at night, who did we take this from, and who must we offer credit and apologies to? A group of people organize a blockade in a sequence singing “zameen nahi denge”, Ratnakar stops and looks at them, pained at the dark irony of the heartbreaking futility of the protest. And yet, Devashish names the film after the one character who has no speaking lines, a 3-month-old baby, maybe projecting his hope for a better world for her.
Hopefully, the film makes you ask these questions as well and seek your own answers. Go watch it at a theatre near you.
