'Dum Maaro Dum' (Hindi, Action)
Director: Rohan Sippy
Cast: Abhishek Bachchan, Rana Daggubati, Prateik Babbar, Bipasha Basu, Aditya Pancholi, Monty Munford
Well before there was foreign direct investment, affordable medical care or a burgeoning service industry, foreigners came to India. They came in search of a culture much older than their own — in search of history and spirituality. For some, their quest would end when they found Goa.
In that little western corner of India, more than others, they were welcomed as long lost brethren. The vestiges of a colony still remain in a state that was brought into the fold less than fifty years ago and not just in the architecture. Those who call Goa home often cite antecedents elsewhere.
Consider, for instance, ‘Dum Maaro Dum’s Celeste. His prized souvenir from a trip to Europe is sand from the village of his Portuguese ancestors. It doesn’t lie in an urn on his mantelpiece as a distant memory. It lies at the center of his cross locket – at the heart of his identity. Much like its milieu, ‘Dum Maaro Dum’ is a curious mixture of East and West. The West undoubtedly inspires its cinematic technique, with its aesthetic sense of sepia and Innaritu-esque setup.
But its larger concerns are in many ways Eastern. It may be replete with guns, bullets and hordes of hallucinogen abusers but these are just a few of the threads that weave the continuum its characters inhabit. At its core, Rohan Sippy’s film is about two love stories coming together to salvage the future of a third. It is a uniquely male fantasy and grossly idealistic, but its excess is well cloaked in the blood-soaked grittiness that permeates the film.
Our first introduction is to the youngest of the romances. At 17, Lawrence ‘Lorry’ Gomes is ill equipped to deal with the simple disparities that crop up in a relationship — a girlfriend who is academically more successful. While his girlfriend, Tani, and he have been admitted to Griffin University in the US, only Tani has secured the necessary funding.
Without $15,000, the wings of Lorry’s Griffin dreams will be clipped and with them his future with Tani. Lorry is intelligent enough to foresee the destructive pressure that distance has on a relationship but not mature enough to accept it. So when an acquaintance from the other side of the law offers up a sordid mixture of temptations, Lorry dares to give his dreams feathers again. While love blinds some, it just fits others with blinkers. His gaze fixed on a future in the US with Tani, Lorry is blindsided by the long arm of the law — and these arms belong to Vishnu Kamath.
Kamath’s arms carry their own baggage — stained suitcases of corruption and ruddy remembrances of a family. The added weight, however, implies that when his arms do come down, they come down hard. Sent on special deputation to clean up Goa by the Chief Minister himself, Kamath plays the game like a man with nothing to lose: and much like his oddly named colleague Mercy D’Costa, he doesn’t. “We don’t ring the bell when we get home, we unlock our doors,” he sermonises to explain his take-no-prisoners approach.
He constantly butts heads with the local mafioso, Lorsa Buiscuita and his investigations lead him to Goa’s Keyser Soze figure, Michael Barbosa. His shadowy stature and the dread surrounding his name live even in the whispers of Goa’s police stations. The name immediately becomes the focal point of Kamath’s investigation and his very reason to clean the gutter he willingly entered.
Joki is the quintessential sossegado civilian who would prefer that the gutter stayed out of sight and therefore out of mind. As an employee in one of Biscuita’s hotels, he would rather look the other way than probe the origins of the money that finds its way in to his pocket.
Even as his romance with Zoe becomes collateral damage to Biscuita’s drug regime, he continues to sing his ballads than take pre-emptive action. After all, an artist’s wont is to remain a fly on the wall and record events for posterity, is it not? As he croons the lack of phone calls and the disappearance of all that is vibrant at Tani’s going away party, we are given to believe that he is singing what lies in store for Lorry. Only much later do we realise he is mourning his own loss – a loss that was again the result of his girl pursuing the wings of lost dreams.
So it comes as no surprise that Joki is unwilling to stand by and watch as the same fate befalls Lorry. As he says to his friends, the fight isn’t just about Lorry but about all of Goa’s children.
The kitsch and machismo in the dialogue of ‘Dum Maaro Dum’ belies a certain subtlety in the accompanying visuals. Kamath’s constant allusion to a metaphorical gutter is mined for a filtering of drains to find drugs flushed down a toilet and a wet day is not just one where there is a heavenly downpour of tears.
The Zoe-Joki romance in particular unfolds in a touching collage of photographs – not on a facebook wall but on the more traditional refrigerator. The progression of the relationship from personal to distant is signified by the juxtaposition of intimate portraits with postcards from across the universe. We recognize that Zoe has replaced Joki with the Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower and other locales from her dreams.
There is an unstated homage to Shyam Benegal’s ‘Trikal’ in each character’s current struggle with the demons of their past. The future is always remain shrouded in uncertainty but it is in our power to hold out hope. And in the end that is exactly what the lost loves of Kamath and Joki provide both Lorry and Goa – hope.