Shanghai (Dibakar Banerjee, 2012)
Was in college when this came out and all I remember is that shot of Abhay Deol walking away from that party in the end. At the time, and until my rewatch I was convinced that all this was, was a deeply cynical movie and that its cynicism had dovetailed so perfectly into my own naïve apolitical leanings at the time.
Few weeks ago while discussing Z, நி mentioned that Shanghai was a remake. So I fired up a rewatch only to realise what a fool I once was. Dibakar Banerjee doesn’t settle for a competent remake but recontextualises the work and elevates it!
If Z is a straight sharp arrow, Shanghai is a leaky messy blob. I began my rewatch looking for traces of Z and mistakenly assumed Kalki’s addition to the script as Ahmadi’s lover+cadre — Shalini — was nothing but a producer’s note to include ‘romance’. (The original only implies Lambrakis’ failing marriage). But soon after the ‘incident’, these curious complications give the movie a life of its own.
In Z, the prosecutor functions as a portrait of incorruptible idealism demonstrating what justice could look like if practiced from a place of detached objective reason. But Shanghai operates within the grit and grime of the real world. The lawyer played by a capable Abhay Deol is compromised from scene one. If there is an equivalent of the ideal prosecutor it resides in Kalki, and the movie, rather than pursue justice, spends all of its run time systematically disabusing Kalki, and by extension us, that there is no such thing. There are only deals and trade-offs, for in Shanghai justice isn’t won, it is insinuated.
Banerjee complicates every aspect of Z, connecting every actor and situating every relationship within the web of caste, class and institutional power hierarchies. Ahmadi, Aruna, Shalini, her maid, the driver, the goons, the ministers. Everyone is expendable, the system chugs on.
Sure, this remains as cynical as I once thought it to be. But one, I don’t think the cynicism is unearned and two it still makes the case for hope. Except hope here doesn’t allude to the fantasy of a brilliant man taking on captial C Corruption. Instead it resides in the fact that despite the game being rigged there remains the option to exercise free will, to do the right thing. We just need to find the right leverage.
A special shout out to Emran Hashmi: a standout performance and it kills me that he doesn’t get to play more weirdos. And it amuses me to no end when I hear right-wing idiots play ‘bharat mata ki’ unironically — with pride even — in every nationalist parade.