Shahid Review and BO Update

Raj Kumar's perfectly pitched lead performance in Shahid'

The index of a biopic's success is the biographer's eye and judgement. A writer or director can be variously inspired to immerse in a life"the dangerous impulses of the obscure drove Truman Capote to Holcomb, Kansas, when he wrote In Cold Blood; Gus Van Sant's portrait of Harvey Milk in his film Milk has the unmistakable tone of awe and inspiration. Both are random examples of portraits in which the maker is interested not just in chronicling an extraordinary life through facts, thereby making it emotionally and politically correct, but has his or her own position and own creative and intellectual stake in its making.

In Shahid, a biopic of the murdered criminal lawyer Shahid Azmi, director Hansal Mehta's admiration of his subject, and his subject's activist zeal, is evident. Azmi was killed in his Mumbai office in 2010 after having famously represented lower middle-class Muslim men randomly picked up and implicated by the police and justice establishment in solving cases involving terrorism and communal violence. These men were without help and money and Azmi often worked for free, with pragmatism and guts.

Mehta delineates Shahid's life in a simple and linear arc. After the 1992 Bombay riots, which jeopardizes the security of Shahid (Raj Kumar) and his family of three brothers and his mother living in Govandi, he enrolls in a camp training armed Muslim dissidents in Kashmir and is arrested on his return the following year, under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (Tada). After spending five years in prison where he completes his higher education, and where he makes acquaintances whose antecedents are with underworld dons on the run or terrorist groups, Shahid completes his law course, joins a renowned criminal lawyer in Mumbai (Tigmanshu Dhulia), and after a few months, starts his own practice. Early in his career, he falls in love with a harrowed single mother Mariam (Prabhleen Sandhu) embroiled in an ugly property dispute, and marries her. Shahid's involvement in his cases distances himself form his family, as he begins receiving frequent death threats.

In a short solo career, Shahid won 17 cases, quite a feat in our sluggish criminal justice system. After his death, in 2012, the Supreme Court acquitted Fahim Ansari of all charges in connection with the 26 November 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai. Ansari, who was accused by the Mumbai police of having provided the 10 terrorists with logistical support, was represented by Shahid, who had proved in a lower court that there was not enough evidence against Ansari.

Mehta and his writers, Sameer Gautam Singh and Apurva Asrani, just about touches upon Shahid's early life in the Kashmir camp. There is very little of how it was possible for Shahid to strengthen his cases so fast, or how he wrestled with the system and used its failings to his advantage. In that sense, it is a uni-dimensional portrait. The character is too thin for what he actually did and achieved; the layers never really opens up. We see Shahid only as a man with a purpose"undaunted and upright, going about his job inside the courtroom; his legal bristle forthright and unmitigated.

The courtroom scenes are riveting, and are indeed the film's best parts. The two cases we see Shahid representing get detailed time. The camera is fluid, and the lighting is natural, to miniaturize the claustrophobic, chaotic and humorous battlegrounds in which laws are made and unmade in Indian courts. The research for these sequences are meticulous, both of the writers and the actors. Shahid is engrossing more as a courtroom drama than as a biopic"this is the real courtroom circus.

In dialogue, art direction, visuals and performance, the film is sparse and focussed. Mehta's storytelling is sharp. In secondary roles, the performances of Prabhleen Sandhu, Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub and Baljinder Kaur are efficient and convincing. At the centre is actor Raj Kumar's perfectly pitched lead performance. He neither magnifies nor underplays the character's seeming ordinariness, but the tough interior is obvious without any dialogues or situations to actually show it. In his first solo lead role, Raj Kumar is outstanding. He makes a simple character interesting till the last scene when we just hear a gunshot in the dark.

Shahid is an admirable project, but as a biopic, it is far short of a masterpiece.

Shahid releases in theatres on Friday.

Cast: Raj Kumar Yadav, Prabhleen Sandhu, K K Menon
Director: Hansal Mehta
Rating: Four stars

That rare quality - humanism - is its calling card. Whatever its political ramifications or accuracy to reality may be, here's a re-enactment which makes the viewer's heart bleed over the abrupt end of a man's life. On February 11, 2000, Shahid Azmi was shot dead point blank by shadowy assailants, in his tiny office in Mumbai's Kurla neighbourhood. He was 32.

Chances are that the human rights lawyer could have become just another page on the Google grid. Now, co-writer and director Hansal Mehta makes sure that he will missed and admired. They don't make crusaders like Shahid any more, and the eponymously-titled film does complete justice to the man driven by a cause.

No facile task this: the lawyer did have his faults and transgressions. That he spent time in jail, subsequent to his flight to and return from Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, cannot be erased. That he was disillusioned by the violent code of the militants there, and then backtracked, cannot be overlooked either. In these aspects, Hansal Mehta opts to glide over the events. In fact, Shahid Azmi's escape from the camp of terrorist trainers is far too stagey and conventional, reminding you at most of Mani Ratnam's thrills-and-politics cocktails.

In jail, the reluctant fundamentalist goes through a make-over, takes to studying law, thanks to benefactors (including K K Menon, in an impactful cameo). On being acquitted, Shahid approaches everyday life with a lawyer's degree, and an unflinching commitment to his profession. Again this part is recounted, in simplistic short-hand. Hang on, though. From the moment, Shahid Azmi is motivated to take on the cases of those wrongfully apprehended under TADA, the real-life drama rocks big-time.

Hansal Mehta, then, gives the bio-pic the kind of purity and power, which can be only sourced from actual facts. Result: the screenplay moves way beyond a political polemic. Its form is that of a story which is replete with doubts, complexities of familial relationships, tenacity and breakthroughs. The extended Azmi family - housed in a hovel - is dominated by a matriarch, the kind you can still encounter in any mohalla of Mumbai, aware that things cannot be the same again for the minority community, post the 1992-'93 riots and the 26/11 terror attacks.

Indeed in his career-redefining endeavour, Hansal Mehta's film may have been intended as a political act, but it never loses emotional contact with the audience. On the one hand, you meet the corrupt and degenerate, the bullies and the unprincipled. And on the other, there's Shahid, an honorable pacifist. No invincible hero he, the activist lawyer requests his elder brother (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) for some more financial support, a scene which is harrowingly touching.

It's not about the loving the family, it is plainly about primeval solidarity. Moreover, the lawyer's marriage to an upright woman (Prabhleen Sandhu), with a knee-high son, is absolutely life-like. Their initial courtship in a caf is picturised with a touch of humour and dignity. As for the woman's umbrage to the threat to their lives, it is entirely justified. A pragmatist to the core, she does not see any point in Shahid's obsessive combat for the defenceless. The woman's real.

As the portrait of Shahid Azmi progresses, the strokes get bolder, particularly in the courtroom sequences where lung-power and rhetoric prevail. At various stages, two public prosecutors use every trick in the book to twist the facts of the matter. Meanwhile, the TADA-detainee looks on mutely as the noose seems to get tighter. These passages, as well as the tarring of Shahid's face right outside the courtroom, are reinforced with technical proficiency -- by the sparseness of Anuj Dhawan's camerawork, Apurva Asrani's meditative editing and the conviction of the acting crew.

In the title role, Raj Kumar Yadav, with his bottled-up rage, unwavering body language and a seamed haunted face, is nothing short of outstanding, worthy of note by any film award jury. Shalini Vatsa as the belligerent public prosecutor and Vipin Sharma as the wisecracking sort are first-rate, immediately recognisable as the legal eagles who can undermine even the most fool-proof defence arguments.

More: Prabhleen Sandhu, as the woman who cannot endure the hovering danger at home, is impressively confident. Mohammed Zeeshan Saayed, as the self-sacrificing elder brother, delivers a thoughtfully shaded piece of acting. Come to think of it, Yadav's and the supporting ensemble's performances, are so naturally allied to the content that you feel that they weren't aware of the camera's gaze at all.

Given the biopic genre, the direction is intelligent as well as hard-hitting. Hysterics are muzzled. Hansal Mehta doesn't use violence except to make you detest violence, and such humanitarianism is becoming rare if not not extinct.

To be sure, the story has inherent high-drama, but when it works against the ruling, intolerant forces (whatever their ideology and agenda), it's a valuable piece of cinema. A Shahid Azmi can be snuffed out anytime, anywhere by anyone. Without naming names, Hansal Mehta amplifies the fact that right-wing bigotry and intolerance persist, just around the corner.

And in the process, he resurrects the life of a man of courage. Shahid will not be forgotten. Catch the film right now.