Film: Ankur Arora Murder Case
Cast: Kay Kay Menon, Arjun Mathur, Tisca Chopra, Paoli Dam, Manish Chaudhary, Vishakha Singh
Director: Suhail Tatar
An overconfident doctor who considers himself God botches a case. A patient dies on the table due to medical negligence. The premise is a good one, especially after Aamir Khan has conditioned the Indian audience to be suspicious of all doctors and hospitals with his sweeping indictment in Satyamev Jayate. But, despite an interesting storyline and some very capable actors, Ankur Arora Murder Case doesn’t affect us the way a medical-legal drama about the death of a child should.
Perhaps the title and the trailer gave too much away. Perhaps this film would have been more interesting if we didn’t know what happened to Ankur Arora. But, even under the circumstances, the story could have taken us into the emotional cost of medical malpractice. Instead, the film is populated by one-dimensional characters who evoke neither our sympathy nor empathy – the arrogant hotshot doctor (Kay Kay Menon), the stoic single mother (Tisca Chopra), the idealistic greenhorn (Arjun Mathur), the powerpuff lawyer girl (Paoli Dam). This is further pegged down by a narrative cliché involving the two lawyers who face off in the courtroom.
The film’s name makes the plot evident – Ankur Arora, who is brought in with a stomach ache and carted off to the operation theatre, dies because of a surgery that may not have been necessary. The mother sues. Can a woman take on the reputation of a doctor and the money-power of a hospital, all by herself?
A narrative like this has tremendous scope – there are moral issues involved, such as the failings of the medical profession, and the business mentality and corporatisation of hospitals; there are emotional issues, such as the trauma of a mother who has lost her child and the trauma of a surgeon who must come to terms with the idea that a life isn’t a statistic; there are legal and ethical issues; there are personal issues. What is the future of a man who makes a costly error that is weighed against the rest of his career? How does a divorcee deal with the blame of a child dying in her custody?
The film doesn’t delve as deep as it should into the core of the story. It becomes a lengthy courtroom drama, throwing in as many medical terms as it can in order to sound authentic. The characters haven’t been fleshed out, and they don’t grow through the film. There is no effort to get into the mind of a man who must stay remote from his patients in order to serve them best, a man for whom confidence is crucial, whose decisions can cost lives. There is no conviction in the character of the mother, who remains stolid and determined all through. Though there are two interns with different persuasions, their attitude towards the medical profession is not explored with the finesse it could have been.
The Verdict: A lazy narrative and predictable storyline undermine the potential of this film.
