'No One Killed Jessica' (Hindi, Crime, 2011)
Director: Raj Kumar Gupta
Cast: Vidya Balan, Rani Mukerji
In the summer of 1999, while the war in Kargil was underway, Sabrina Lall (Vidya Balan) launched a battle of her own. Her sister Jessica (Myra) was shot dead by Manish (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayub), the son of a politician, and Sabrina soldiered on till justice was served many long and laboured years later. This is a matter on public record, and the question walking into Raj Kumar Gupta’s ‘No One Killed Jessica’ is how he is going to make us sit through a story whose beginning, middle and end we already know.
Will he, with a documentarian’s cool eye, opt for dispassionate disquisition? Or will he rip into the material with the righteous indignation so beloved to filmmakers who want their films to be about something — something big and topical and heavy? Gupta, to his credit (and I must admit, to my great relief), treads a middle path that’s tasteful and tactful and yet not embalmed with noble intentions. His film is alive — an artfully made, commercially viable entertainment, a straightforward story backed by sophisticated storytelling.
I suppose there will be those who bring up the not insignificant issue of manufacturing a broad “entertainment” from the outlines of a real-life tragedy, but Gupta is clear about his purposes, and what he sets out to do he does very well. (He calls this a “hybrid of fact and fiction;” I’d call it fiction based on fact.) He wants to document a slice of our recent history, but he wants to make a film first — a movie that can be watched as commentary, as a footnote, as a reminder, or just as a stand-alone story. And to this effect, he employs a battery of time-tested audience-baiting tools.
He narrates his story in bite-sized vignettes and with a foot pressed on the accelerator, so despite our familiarity with the facts, we are swept along by the momentum and our interest never flags. He stages conventionally dramatic courtroom scenes, rife with bilious rhetoric that clearly demarcates the good guys from the bad.
And Gupta’s most canny, most crowd-pleasing ploy is to cast Rani Mukerji against type. This is exactly the kind of grownup part she should be playing, and, liberating herself from the Meg Ryan cutesiness that had long passed its expiry date, the actress comes up with a fierce and funny performance.
She nails a character whose most redeeming aspect is that she’s not a selfless martyr. When she wins a point against a news editor who sees little value in pursuing the Jessica Lall story, she’s not above a small smile of victory. Justice for Jessica is certainly important, but so is the recognition this will bring her — she’s doing this story as much for Jessica as herself.
This is an old-fashioned film in the best sense, almost simplistic in the way it wraps itself around readily identifiable tropes of a readily identifiable genre. I saw ‘No One Killed Jessica’ as a gender-bending Western (which is just another name for the near-mythological masala movie with a dharma- upholding Saviour at the centre) — instead of a ‘Man with No Name’, there’s a Woman with a Name, Rani Mukerji’s Meera. She rides into a lawless town, sets things right with her own brand of justice (including a very funny sting operation), and walks away in slow motion, as alone as she was when she walked in. And Vidya Balan is the luckless frontier-woman, imperilled by bandits with political muscle.
But underneath this classical narrative structure, under this story of readily recognizable surfaces, there are reserves of great depth. Sabrina, at first glance, is the typical wallflower, recessive and passive to the extreme. When we see her first, she’s sleeping, and nothing, apparently, will wake her up.
In a photograph taken with her sister, it’s Jessica, smiling and self-aware, who’s in front; Sabrina is content in the background, her head resting on her sister’s shoulder. With her hair hunched up in a scrunchy and with her very ordinary and loose-fitting tees, this is not someone who looks for attention and wants to be noticed. With her reluctance to put herself out there and take a stand and assert herself, she might be the Invisible Woman, and even Vidya Balan’s affecting and dignified performance is invisible, in the background.
These details are strewn throughout the story, not presented to us in a character-defining flash, and it’s only as they accrue that we see what it must have taken for this woman, this invisible woman, to step into the spotlight for the sake of her sister, how uncharacteristic (and therefore how scary and brave) her actions must have been. The ending is only deceptively triumphant. It’s mostly sad and cynical in the way it underlines how someone like Sabrina is still unable to achieve something as standard as justice, something the citizens of a democracy should take for granted at least in a case as open-and-shut as this one.
Sabrina needs somebody like Meera, a deus ex machina, to overcome these obstacles. And you have to think: what about all those others whose stories aren’t picked up by a sensational news reporter?
The few times the film falters are when it plays too much to the gallery, mostly in depicting high society in the fashion that has made Madhur Bhandarkar famous (or infamous, depending on how you view his cinema). But Gupta’s rage is more against the system that fails to protect the common man.
And yet, Jessica is an uncommon woman. The film contends that she is not a “good girl” like Sabrina. She falls asleep in church. When she teases her sister with offers of a “virgin” cocktail, there are hints that Jessica has been around the block.
The most unsentimental aspect of this film is that Jessica isn’t boxed into a set of saintly traits, so that her death makes the country mourn for the loss of a noble and pure soul. We mourn for Jessica precisely because she was not noble and pure, and because she lived life to the fullest and because that spark of exuberant life was extinguished in an instant, without second thought. For all its unapologetic attempts at audience pleasing, ‘No One Killed Jessica’ doesn’t stop to wonder if Jessica would play more sympathetically if she were more like Sabrina, and it celebrates her as a spunky, unapologetically Westernised free-spirit.
The film ends not with shots of Sabrina or Meera, but with images of Jessica modelling to the camera, to the audience, every freeze-frame a reminder of poses that never happened. Had she lived today, she might have been an unremarkable person, an anonymous woman in a big city, but because she died, she’s come to stand for that oddest of contradictions: an impure, imperfect
Indian heroine.