‘Jigra’ Review: Style, Substance, and Alia Bhatt

Director: Vasan Bala
Writers: Vasan Bala, Debashish Irengbam
Cast: Alia Bhatt, Vedang Raina, Manoj Pahwa, Rahul Ravindran, Vivek Gomber
Language: Hindi

Most directors make you feel like you’re watching their film — their technical prowess, their intent, their voice, their commercial and arthouse ambitions. But directors like Vasan Bala make you feel like you’re watching their dreams come true. His movies aren’t shown, they’re shared. His craft isn’t flaunted, it’s realised. In Jigra, there are no shots, only fulfilled aspirations. There are no scenes and set pieces, only childhood memories. There is no action, only the physicality of emotion. There is no story, only the narrativisation of storytelling.

In an age of lazy remakes and mindless tributes, Bala reimagines a small subplot (featuring Soni Razdan) from Mahesh Bhatt’s Gumrah (1993) as Jigra, a sister-brother story that single-handedly reverses the gender dynamics of Bollywood action thrillers. The way he does this is almost affectionate — it’s the cinematic manifestation of recalling a random detail of an old movie and bringing it to life. Alia Bhatt stars as Satya Anand, a steely-eyed orphan whose younger brother, Ankur (Vedang Raina), is sentenced to death for drug possession in a fictional Southeast Asian country called Hanshi Dao. Ankur has been forced to take the fall for the wealthy relatives that brought them up. Satya has no patience for the bureaucracy and rules of a land that’s built on the erasure of empathy. She soon teams up with Bhatia (Manoj Pahwa), the retired gangster father of an inmate on death row, and Muthu (Rahul Ravindran), a retired policeman driven by the guilt of a wrongful arrest; their plans range from jailbreaks to last-ditch infiltrations. Simultaneously, Ankur teams up with a few other inmates to stage their own tunnel escape.

Alia Bhatt in Jigra.

A poignant scene features Satya and Ankur having a strangely relaxed chat during one of her visits. It’s an exchange pinned with social undercurrents; there is hope and hopelessness at once. Both have a plan that the other one isn’t aware of. You can tell that Satya, being the overprotective sister that she is, doesn’t even consider the possibility of Ankur being his own person; she assumes it’s all up to her. It ties into an early moment in the film where Satya’s first reaction on learning of Ankur’s business trip is not of pride or excitement but stress. You can also tell that Ankur doesn’t expect his sister to walk the talk; he underestimates her purely because he is a man. A lot of Jigra plays up this perception — Satya wears oversized clothes, looks tinier and more deluded with every frame — so that the payoff feels sweeter.

The reason her journey is so visceral, and the stakes appear so high, is because she’s fighting not just a system but a gaze. It’s tempting to think that she is proving the world (including her brother) wrong, but the fact is she couldn’t care less. Her courage is incidental. She isn’t there to pose in slow-mo stunts or even recognise the audacity of her mission (ironically, this only adds to the impact of the sequences). She isn’t there to make a statement. Jigra gets that. More importantly, Alia Bhatt gets that. My heart often says that there is no actor like Bhatt working in mainstream Hindi cinema. Jigra allows my mind to say the same thing. Bhatt’s Satya is a masterclass in cold-blooded love. She is so complicated that she’s eerily simple; the emotional numbness of her performance is rooted in the character’s trauma. Except, it’s the kind of numbness that acts as a front for repression — a trait that subverts the context of the deadpan-action-hero template. She is going through anticipatory grief while at once battling to prevent it.

Satya will stop at nothing because she is aching to explode; she’s so determined to play the role of a big sister that she refuses to express herself until she succeeds or fails. She knows no alliance, religion, conscience or moral responsibility. She is “good” only by virtue of desiring to extract her brother from a rigid setting; the prison guards just happen to be ruthless and brutal. But she isn’t good if you take into account the way she uses the political tensions of the place to her advantage, the way she has no qualms causing collateral damage, or the way she fights Muthu for caring about the consequences of her actions. She is no hero, and the film’s visualisation of her dares us to think of her as one. It’s an excellent provocation that mines the cultural relationship between valour and violence; between commentary and craft.

Alia Bhatt in Jigra.

Most of all, Bala’s trademark cinephilia — the Amitabh Bachchan nods, a ruthless jailer (Vivek Gomber, at his campy best) named “Hans Raj Landa”, the Enter the Dragon (1973) riffs, the retro-musical cues — nails the balance between celebrating cinema and holding it accountable. The misstep of Gumrah, where the jailed character (Sridevi) is first established as a global celebrity, is revised; the anonymity of the brother-sister duo in Jigra is shaped by the rich family’s decision to protect their own interests. The angry-young-man trope makes way for a stoic-young-woman trope. The ballad of sisterhood (the R.D. Burman-classic ‘Phoolon Ka Taaron Ka’) sounds like it’s customised to undo the modern hymn to toxic masculinity (‘Papa Meri Jaan’ from Animal). A new-age catchphrase (“Ghar me ghus ke marenge”) is reframed as the personal quest of an Indian who literally breaks into a foreign nation and raises hell — but without an inkling of revenge, patriotism or basic humanity.

While walking out of the theatre, I felt all the things one feels after a solid big-screen experience. On my way home, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the powerful climax felt like a culmination of the film’s flaws rather than a concealment of them. Scattered terms like “Alia” and “best” ran through my head. Yet, there was more. The lump in my throat implied that I was moved by the film. But the truth reveals the essence of Jigra: I was moved by the filmmaker.