Aligarh movie review

Star cast of Aligarh: Manoj Bajpayee, Rajkummar Rao, Ashish Vidyarthi, Sumit Gulati, Dilnaz Irani
Director: Hansal Mehta

Rating : ***1/2

Aligarh movie review: Manoj Bajpayee makes of Siras a man whose bewildered fragility is up for examination, and whose gentleness demands understanding and compassion. There are initial moments where you can see Bajpayee trying. And then he becomes Siras.

An elderly professor at one of India’s once-of the most prestigious centres of higher learning is hounded out – of his job, and his humble abode — because of his sexual orientation. What happens to him makes up Hansal Mehta’s ‘Aligarh’. It is a film both timely and telling, because of what it is about, and how it is told.

Queer characters are not characters who just happen to be queer in most Bollywood movies. They are stereotypes sent up for sniggers (with the notable exception of a few of Onir’s films, ‘My Brother Nikhil’, and ‘I Am’ ; Karan Johar’s segment in ‘Bombay Talkies’). They mince rather than walk. They dangle their wrists. They are there to be mocked at.

Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras (Manoj Bajpayee) is getting on in years. As befits a teacher and author, he is a man of letters. He likes poetry. He likes a glass or two of the good stuff when the day is ending. Above all he is alone, sharing his loneliness with Lata Mangeshkar’s soulful songs, and occasionally, a tryst with another human who just happens to be of the same sex.

Deepu (Rajkummar Rao) is the Delhi-based reporter of a national daily who stumbles upon the Siras ‘story’ in a local Aligarh paper, and pursues it with his photographer colleague Tashi (Gulati). (Full disclosure: Deepu Sebastian Edmond, on whom Rao’s reporter is based, was with the Indian Express when the story broke; photojournalist Tashi Tobgyal works with the paper).

Siras’ ‘case’ segues into the historic 2009 Delhi High Court judgement which decriminalized homosexuality, and is fought by a legal eagle (Ashish Vidyarthi) who places privacy in a bedroom beyond the ‘moral’ pale, and sneering guardians of ‘morality’. The hectoring tone of the public prosecutor in Allahabad is of a piece with the general castigation brought to bear upon the LGBT community, and Siras’s exoneration feels like a victory, even if short-lived.

What is really interesting about Siras is his visible discomfort at being labelled ‘gay’; he’d rather not be labelled anything at all. That discomfiture tells us much more about him than anything else: he is of a generation which doesn’t go around sticking convenient bumper-stickers on people; for him they are just people, whether they dance, giving vent to their longing, in all-stag parties (one of the film’s most astonishingly poignant sequences), or whether they barge into his bedroom, video camera at the ready.
Manoj Bajpayee makes of Siras a man whose bewildered fragility is up for examination, and whose gentleness demands understanding and compassion. There are initial moments where you can see Bajpayee trying. And then he becomes Siras, greying hair curling at the temples, a worn suit to be donned when out of the house, an old blanket draped around the shoulders when home, fingers carving notes in the air as Lata’s voice fills his shabby living room. It is a fine performance, quiet and affecting.

And it carries ‘Aligarh’, especially when Manoj Bajpayee transcends himself, and gives us a man trying to deal with pain and humiliation with dignity. Rao’s youthful ebullience is an effective counter, his Malayalam- inflected Hindi just right. It is a pleasure to see these actors interact. The newsroom doesn’t feel as real as it should, though (for that, please watch ‘Spotlight’, which gets it spot-on): those portions are off-key. I also missed seeing Siras’s relationship with his students : or, seeing the perfunctory nature of the department of Marathi that Siras heads at the Aligarh Muslim University (everyone in the film carefully leaves out the ‘Muslim’ whenever the name comes up), did he have any to speak of? Did he leave his native Maharashtra to seek refuge in Aligarh?

But the film itself is bigger than these things. Like in his ‘Shahid’, Hansal Mehta and scriptwriter Apurva Asrani have come up with a lead character and a film which shines with authenticity and emotional heft, which leaves you thinking, and which says something we should all listen to, especially in these times when it has become more imperative than ever before: we can be different, but we are us.

                                                                                                                                             

Words do not make poetry, Aligarh University professor Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras (Manoj Bajpayee) tells Delhi journo Deepu Sebastien (Rajkummar Rao) well over an hour into Hansal Mehta's Aligarh.

Poetry, says the sexagenarian protagonist, is what springs forth from between the lines - the pauses and the silences.

Aligarh, as pointed and poignant a portrait of loneliness as any that Indian cinema has ever produced, is unwaveringly true to that dictum.

Mehta's treatment of an emotive theme is sensitive and sedate; the film's impact is searing.
Aligarh is equal parts a powerful character study, an incisive social commentary, a tragedy of harrowing proportions and a cautionary parable about a society rife with contradictions.

The story, an introductory disclaimer asserts, is inspired by real events modified on the basis of related media reports and legal proceedings.

The film is set in the months following the 2009 Delhi high court ruling that held Article 377 unconstitutional and decriminalized homosexuality - the verdict was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2013.

Aligarh hinges on the legal battle that Siras fought against his university to have his job, home and dignity restored to him.

Siras loses his professorship and his staff accommodation after two media men armed with a video-recorder barge into his home and film him in bed with a rickshaw-puller.

What follows is an ugly, concerted campaign by the university authorities to hound the professor and break his spirit.

The lecturer, with his back to the wall, finds an unlikely sympathiser in a rookie journalist who decides to get to the bottom of the dynamics at work on the campus against Siras.

The film returns repeatedly to the pivotal opening sequence in which Siras' privacy is invaded, and each replay reveals crucial additional details and perspectives.

In real life, the reporter who chases the Siras story never actually met the professor in person. They only spoke on the phone a few times.

But in film editor and screenwriter Apurva M Asrani's script, the two men have heart-to-heart conversations (even though Siras's eyes rarely meet Deepu's), bond with each other, and even take a selfie during a boat ride.

The interaction is germane to the film's structure as the two characters represent two opposed realities of contemporary India.

The older man, battered by the vagaries of life, is a few months away from superannuation. He clings to his pint of Royal Stag and fix of old Lata Mangeshkar songs to tide over his solitude.
Melancholy hangs heavy on Siras. Even the two Lata numbers that he savours - both soulful Madan Mohan compositions - are gloom-drenched.

Both the sound design (by Mandar Kulkarni), which allows ample space for silences, and the cinematography (by Satya Rai Nagpaul) accentuate the dark mood that encircles Siras.

The enthusiastic young scribe, on the other hand, is only starting out in life and has no reason to be downbeat about the future.

The principal spaces that Deepu occupies - the newspaper office and his PG accommodation - are infinitely brighter and more cheerful.

Aligarh is an obvious companion piece to Hansal Mehta's Shahid, which, too, told the story of a member of a minority group fighting a lonely losing battle.

In a more general sense, this gutsy film also extends the director's favourite theme - outsiders refusing to blend in and falling afoul in the process.

Both Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar (which also had Manoj Bajpayee in the male lead) and City Lights (with Rajkummar Rao) homed in on migrants pushed into acts of desperation in an unwelcoming adopted city, Mumbai.

The protagonist of Aligarh is at multiple removes from his milieu. As he himself spells out early in the film, he teaches Marathi in a city of Urdu-speaking people. He is also single in a colony of married people and conventional families.

What Siras leaves unsaid is that it is his sexual orientation that places him most directly at odds with the guardians of an ultra-conservative campus.

Siras rues that today's youngsters tend to reduce everything to convenient, sweeping adjectives - fantastic, fabulous, awesome, et al - losing out in the bargain on the possibility of grasping the subtleties of life and love.

In fact, he says that he does not understand what the word 'gay' means. He abhors labels, but he is too soft and meek a man to wage a concerted war against his tormentors.

Manoj Bajpayee, as a gentle, dignified soul whose privacy is invaded by a blinkered society intolerant of its non-conformists, propels Aligarh forward.

As Siras, the actor projects much more than just a mimetic guise. He digs very, very deep to totally internalise the man's debilitating agony.

With every pore and sinew pressed into service, Bajpayee, in a miraculous osmosis, becomes inseparable from the tragically reclusive figure that the Marathi teacher and poet was.

Rajkummar Rao, in his third outing with Hansal Mehta, provides the ideal foil to Bajpayee with a performance modulated to perfection.

Aligarh, essentially a study of a victim of entrenched prejudices, articulates its poetry of pain with remarkable precision, right down to the subtlest of its nuances.

Mehta strips the tragic true story of all vestiges of overt sentimentality. Instead, he fills the depths of the understated but intensely moving drama with genuine, unsettling emotion.

So, in addition to being a portrayal of the gay experience in an unjust and insensitive society, Aligarh is a human drama with universal resonance. It encapsulates the plight of all dissenters.