Fair warning: If cruelty towards animals and inhuman treatment of our furry friends does not make your blood boil, it might after you watch this film. Pariah is the story of one man’s mission to punish animal cruelty while he searches for a missing pup — a pup that was the sole ray of hope in his otherwise gloomy and miserable existence. So great is his misery in fact, that he punishes himself every day just for staying alive, survivor’s guilt, maybe. One cannot be sure because not much more than disoriented flashes of his past are ever revealed. His newfound mission gives him purpose, gives him a chance to atone for sins that are left as a mystery to the audience.
Pariah, as a film, has a long list of virtues that need to be discussed, but let’s first get its few shortcomings out of the way. Pariah’s plot, while unique for mainstream Bengali cinema, has a striking resemblance to the renowned John Wick films or the first film more precisely. This becomes a double-edged sword. On one hand, hardcore John Wick fans will love how the makers not only accept the similarities but also pay homage to the now legendary Keanu Reeves character (the famous pencil is replaced by a clothespin) while also managing to steer clear of the route that the John Wick plot takes.
In fact, Pariah’s heart belongs much more to our faithful, loyal, four-legged companions than even the Hollywood blockbuster. However, this is also where the biggest drawback of the movie lies. With John Wick, his attachment to the dog was much better established. The audience could relate to the sentimentality that drove John Wick to single-handedly obliterate the Russian mob. With Pariah, the attachment is left to the audience’s assumptions, very little time is invested in establishing the protagonist’s attachment to the stray pup who becomes the focal point of his mission. When you compare that to how much time is given to certain scenes, especially in the first quarter, to scenes that could easily have done with some trimming, one is left wondering what prompted this creative choice. Certain characters and dialogues that were meant to inspire a chuckle or two, fall flat and instead evoke a sense of irritation.
Despite these shortcomings, Pariah manages to engage the audience and invest in the film emotionally, thanks to everything that it does get right. A lot of that credit goes to the world-building that Tathagata Mukherjee engages in, with obvious and incredible support from his DoP Uttaran De. The world of Pariah is dark, full of shadows, cold, gloomy and cruel for the majority of the film’s runtime, bright and sunny only post-climax — much like its protagonist. Certain scenes will make you squeamish, some of them will serve as visual spectacles, all of them are deliberate choices, all captured as effectively as possible by Uttaran De.
One must also commend his choice of lenses and reliance on natural and low light settings that have added a unique flavor to the scenes. In essence, the film is an action entertainer, with one action set piece leading up to another, which is where one of the film’s biggest strengths lies. The hand-to-hand combat sequences in the film are of the kind that has seldom, if ever, been seen before in Bengali cinema. There is even a small homage to the sequence from Old Boy, if you can spot it. The BGM by Ranajoy Bhattacharjee is brilliant. It makes one cheer for every punch that lands, every kick that sends the goons flying in the action sequences, but also makes one hoot and whistle for something as understandably mundane as a pup running towards the camera.
Despite all its technical prowess and chest-thumping, adrenaline-driven action sequences, I believe the mainstay of the film are some brilliant and sincere performances from its cast, or maybe that’s just my bias as an actor getting the better of me. First off, Sreelekha Mitra as the owner of an NGO that cares for and cures pets and strays alike is inspired casting. No, it’s not because of the obvious similarity to her real-life persona, neither is it because of the even more obvious observation that she is a brilliant actress who has been criminally underused in recent years.
The real reason I call it inspired casting is best left undisclosed, there is more there than meets the eye. Bimal Giri as the easily irritable, corrupt cop is delightful. Deboprasad Haldar, in a brief but extremely impactful role as a sadistic man who gets his kicks from torturing his pet is so menacing and discomforting that one cannot get rid of the mental image of his devilish smirk long after the film has ended. Loknath Dey must surely be able to sleepwalk through such roles by now, although, I am most certain that that might be the last thing he would ever do. I wish I could see more of him in the film.
‘It’s a cause I feel strongly about’
Angana is wonderful yet again. She communicates her helplessness and naivete almost effortlessly. She is tasked with being the symbol of righteousness and sanity in an otherwise mad, mad world — a task she executes and then some.
Soumya Mukherjee as the “big bad butcher” is good enough to give one violent nightmares. Although it’s clearly not a performance where less is more and there are moments where one might feel that he is playing to the gallery, this is exactly the sort of movie where an actor can afford that indulgence and Soumya does so with ease and even manages to make the audience shuffle between sympathy and apathy. Last but not least, it is Vikram who carries the film on his shoulders. Given the plot and the character, one might be forgiven for thinking that it is a role that was tailor-made for a lead actor with a towering physical presence, something that isn’t really associated with Vikram. However, he took on the challenge, put in what must have been tremendous hard work and packed on the muscle to look the part. Physical transformations aside, it needed to be a layered performance. This is not a run-of-the-mill action hero. We needed to see a tormented soul with nothing to lose, someone who can go from monosyllabic replies, grunts and exasperations to sawing limbs off at the drop of a hat. Vikram delivers on that front and how. People who have forever associated him with the boy next door image are in for a pleasant surprise.
In conclusion, it would only be prudent for me to mention that the film has multiple sequences of extreme, explicit and graphic violence, which is where Pariah becomes an important film, because, come to think of it, it is a tremendously risky proposition in the present landscape where Bengali films are essentially funded according to their respective abilities to secure good satellite deals. Given the violent content, it is but natural for me to assume that Tathagata Mukherjee and his entire team and of course the producers made this film with the faith that Bengali film audiences would lap up a full-on bloodbath in the form of a massy, commercial, action entertainer and would fill up the theatres.
Surely, the makers also know that they have made a film which is inherently capable of polarising audiences despite how well made it might be and how much hard work has gone into it. In my observation, there is a strange hypocrisy, for the lack of a better word, that plagues moviegoers in our neck of the woods. We give earth-shattering numbers to massy, logic-defying films in other languages, no matter how divisive they might be. But when it comes to films in our own language, from our own makers, we act high-nosed and reject them because they supposedly require too much suspension of disbelief. Whether Pariah manages to find the audience it deserves will perhaps decide whether filmmakers and producers in Bengal continue to play it safe or finally dare to venture into the territories where we are lagging far behind other regional industries in terms of experimentation. Because no matter what it gets right or wrong, the one thing that Pariah has definitely not done is play it safe. For that itself, it deserves a lot of praise.
Personally, the film and its subject matter resonated with me tremendously because it’s a cause I feel strongly about. I have grown up with dogs, not as pets but as part of my family. Much of what I know about love, life and loyalty, I learned from my angels Bingo, Sushi and Gypsy. If you are anything like me, don’t give this one a miss.
