‘Despatch’ review: Breaking news, broken man
Manoj Bajpayee plays a beleaguered journalist in Kanu Behl's paranoid thriller
There’s a moment late in Despatch when Manoj Bajpayee looks, suddenly and disconcertingly, like his character from Kaun? (1999). It made me think of the giddy fun of that turn, driving Urmila Matondkar half-crazy with those nagging ma’ams. It also made me wonder—despite the obvious differences—what this film might have been like with that Bajpayee performance. Bajpayee once played heels with obvious relish, whereas his character in Despatch is wrapped in disgust and disdain, a bitter pill to spend two hours with.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Kanu Behl film if people were enjoying themselves. There are few directors in India willing to make films as unpleasant. In his two features (Titli, 2014; Agra, 2023) and one short film (Binnu Ka Sapna, 2019), Behl has largely shown us desperate, scheming people caught in cycles of greed, repression and misanthropy. They’re grimy in a way that makes you want to wash them off later.
Despatch is like Behl’s previous films, but also unlike them. His earlier works were, broadly speaking, family dramas and studies in stunted masculinity. Despatch, co-written with Ishani Banerjee, is a thriller, but refracted through his sensibility, just as Joram (2023) was Devashish Makhija’s version of a thriller. Joy Bag (Bajpayee) is an investigative journalist with a Mumbai newspaper called ‘Despatch’. His marriage with his wife, Shweta (Shahana Goswami), is on its last legs. He’s having an affair with Prerna (Arrchita Agarwaal), a younger writer, yet he sleeps around with other women over the course of the film too. I can't see the appeal: he’s a singularly charmless man—insecure, constantly lying, prone to violent outbursts at weak individuals but craven when faced with powerful opposition.
Joy is, however, a dogged, skilled reporter (Mumbai journalist Jey Dey is a likely inspiration). After getting wind of an incident at a Delhi realty firm, he starts looking into a story that builds and builds (among other things, it involves T20 franchises, shell companies, fugitive CEOs in the UK, and the Dubai mafia). Despatch resembles the paranoid thrillers of the ‘70s, especially All the President’s Men (the journalists in both films become curious after a break-in). The difference, though, is most classic paranoid thrillers had, at their centre, someone you could root for, whereas I found it difficult to care about what happened to Joy.
Maybe it’s the genre, but Behl’s usual control with combustible material isn’t quite there this time. The writing is often blunt and unmusical to a fault (“Main tumhari doll nahi hoon”). There’s a scene early on where Joy, home late from work (and hurried sex in the back of a car), reluctantly joins a party his wife has organised. One of his friends drunkenly tries to get him to eat a slice of pizza; Joy protests, then violently shoves him away. It’s hard to blame Joy in this situation, but the film seems to suggest he’s in the wrong—and the cheesy music that plays as the camera pans to shocked faces is misjudged. A later sequence, when Joy is trying to bluster his way into information at the realty firm, could have used some music: the dead air between Joy’s lies and the official’s increasingly suspicious responses hinders what should have been the film’s standout set piece.
If Behl made popular films, men’s rights activists would have his face on a dartboard. Seldom has the Indian onscreen male been uglier or more pathetic than in his work (the women are usually sure of themselves and smarter). Behl’s jaundiced view of gender politics spills into how he depicts sexual relations. Sex is rarely associated with pleasure in his films. This is especially true of Despatch, where the lovemaking is either furtive, uncomfortable or transactional.
Despatch eventually finds its rhythm with three scenes that reveal the contours of what Joy has been chipping away at. Each involves a conversation between Joy and a man he’s never met. The first is in London, with a shadowy businessman (Kabiir Sadanand). Here, the dead air is menacing, as is the mention of mythological poison-imbiber Neelkanth. The second is with a gangster (Salim Arif), another Deep Throat in a parking garage with a warning for a journalist. Both Sadanand and Arif are terrific, and the cameo in the third meeting, Dilip Shankar as an impassive lawyer, is my favourite performance in the film; you can read the temperature of the scene in his twitching fingers.
Towards the end, Joy, at the end of his tether, breaks down and asks, "What have I done, man?" Bajpayee plays the moment without irony—and, of course, there's a larger, important point being made about press freedom in today's India. But there's also a dichotomy here. In another kind of investigative film, this would be a poignant scene, an everyman faced with the futility of resistance. But in Despatch, it only serves to illustrate the self-delusion of a man whose every decision has led to this point.
‘Despatch’ is on Zee5.
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First Published:12 Dec 2024, 04:08 PM IST
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