There are two kinds of Indian journalism movies. Neither of them is nice — which perhaps reflects the state of journalism itself — but it is what it is. The first kind of movie unfolds with the confidence of having spoken to one former reporter as research; it explains the profession like a teacher in third grade because it’s also learning simultaneously. The second kind of movie unfolds with the confidence of having spoken to several reporters from different newsrooms, past and present, so that this research can be reduced to a journalism-for-dummies template; it, too, explains the profession like a teacher in third grade because it thinks that the viewers are learning something they’ve never heard of before.
Reporting Live is, miraculously, a mix of both movies. Spotlight and All The President’s Men ran so that it could crawl. Bhakshak and Scoop walked so that Reporting Live could gasp. The film stars Parineeti Chopra as Sandhya Yadav, a spunky reporter for Azaad Bharati, a Hindi-language news channel in Mumbai that’s spiritually an English-language channel retrofitted in a Hindi film. Sandhya and her cameraman Vinod scour the city for TRP-boosting stories; we know they’re a good team because Sandhya repeats “I think we make a great team!” like a dreamy teenager on a college project at least thrice in the film. She’s angling for a primetime slot and an elusive bonus; her dog Zoey keeps her company in a swanky apartment after work.
When a bridge collapses in rural Maharashtra, the two (Sandhya and Vinod, not Zoey) start to chase a dangerous story: an illegal sand-mining racket that goes right up to the top. The top usually means a builder or industrialist in such movies; politicians are only implied. Naturally, they risk it all to air the story on the channel. Sources are killed, deadly threats may or may not involve the hanging of an animal (why hanging?), and the bosses may or may not be pressured into burying the report. But the minions soldier on. You know how it goes. But such movies assume you don’t know how it goes.
The ABCD template results in many problems for Reporting Live. It opens with what is presumably an assassination on the rainy streets, but the violence is so stylised (look at the floating umbrella) that you wonder if it’s a romantic song gone wrong. It’s not advisable to judge a film from its first sequence, but this one dares you to. Once the narrative begins, the staging is too basic. Sandhya always speaks and asks questions like she has no idea about the real world. Forget the urgency and energy of a television reporter, her curiosity is dumbed down to the point of no return. So you see simplistic scenes — where she’s listening like she’s never heard of knowledge before — featuring a brave village veteran (Amol Palekar) talking like a Wikipedia page so that she can understand. When he leads them to the river front, where the illegal activity is happening, she ‘fools’ workers into believing they’re shooting a documentary. So being exposed in a documentary is fine, I gather. Who watches nonfiction, anyway?
There are other strange ailments. Like a ‘rural filter’ taking over the screen to depict the village. Like a corporation named ‘Golden Sky’ being named against the visual of the sky at dusk. Like Sandhya (meaning “dusk”) speaking chaste Hindi on air as if it were her fourth language; even when she’s casual or thinking, she looks like she’s pretending to be casual or thinking. Like her performative breakdowns. Like an incoherently shot scene featuring Sandhya and Vinod in ‘disguise’ to secretly film a mining site from the top of a mound. Like a sinister goon who tortures sources only if there’s music playing on a transistor. Like the wealthy kingpin, a bird enthusiast, telling Sandhya “I thought you were a sparrow, but you’re just a parrot trying to be an eagle”.
At one point, Sandhya and Vinod successfully break the story, the CEO runs it without any issues, everyone parties at a pub, and life is so perfect in the following montage that it would be a dystopian alt-reality sequence in most movies (where a tragic character wakes up from a happy dream). But it’s not a dream here; it really happens. Because the rude shock is imminent. At another point, you remember that Saswata Chatterjee plays an outgoing editor in the beginning, so when Sandhya needs guidance, he re-appears like Stanley Tucci in Margin Call, a man who gets fired for stumbling onto too many hard truths. They meet in a cinema hall so as to not arouse suspicion, but they chat so normally during the screening that the serious moviegoer in me almost shushed them. Never mind that news producers might have a meltdown on seeing how a story is covertly run from the studio a day before planned — without preparation. It’s the age of AI after all. It’s not so much about authenticity, though; it’s more about selling the drama in a way that distracts viewers from the creative licenses and the lack of detailing.
The one interesting track belongs to Adil Hussain as Sandhya’s boss: an executive editor who sold this channel to a corporate honcho (Shekhar Suman). The real-world parallels aren’t hard to guess, but even so, it’s the tale of many legacy newsrooms. The man remains mentor-like and empathetic to Sandhya and Vinod because they remind him of his younger days. He plays the bridge between the board and his journalists, until the wet-sand cement of his bridge struggles to withstand the pressure. Hussain and Suman are fine as the men representing two sides of “the first draft of history”; a film rooted in their tension might have had more to say.
Instead, Reporting Live stays obsessed with the infantile innocence of Sandhya, a reporter who is stunned to discover that her channel is afraid of reporting the news. 2005 called, it wants its idealism back. It’s never a good sign when dialogue is the only thing that separates an actor from the character. The journalist could be reading out the menu in a restaurant, and we’d be none the wiser. Or she could just be working there. It’s not like we’re drowning in career options.