Film: Hichki
Cast: Rani Mukerji, Neeraj Kabi, Supriya Pilgaonkar
Director: Sidharth P Malhotra
Star Rating: 3/5
Hichki hits the ground running. And then keeps running for a while. Naina Mathur (Rani Mukerji) is attending an interview for the teacher's job at a school and she must explain Tourette Syndrome to everyone like they are five years old. We get this definition multiple times. In different interviews. Naina defining it to an auditorium full of adults.
We get different reaction shots. She gets the job at a school named after Notker the Stammerer. A school bang in the middle of Mumbai named after a monk from what is modern day Switzerland. But for Hichki, Naina and the subjects Malhotra wants to talk about, it works.
At Notker's, Naina is given the task of managing 9F, the section named after a loaded letter, informing the humourless nature of the person who named it. It was probably Mr Wadia (a prim and wry Neeraj Kabi), the class teacher of 9A, gifted with gifted - economically, socially or by any measure - students. Wadia was never for the Tourette Syndrome-afflicted Naina, and her taking on 9F, made of students from underprivileged backgrounds, amuses him, and he counts down the number of days she'll survive teaching students, who, according to Wadia, don't belong there.
The Right to Education term is thrown around and we meet the kids, more than just education wrapped in their minds. One of the girls might not have brought a lunch box but she has a bag of okra to chop when there is no class. Another boy is never seen without a pair of headphones, and breaks into a rap from stray phrases, clearly modelled on the street music scene of Mumbai. As if to stress on the authenticity, we get a song with rap in Tamil that mentions Dharavi.
The first half of Hichki (based on Brad Cohen’s Front of the Class) is the classic underdog film - there is the inspiration in Naina, someone who has had an experience of othering, as the only person empathetic towards the kids. The kids themselves unwelcoming of Naina, who must win them over gradually. The evil villain in Mr Wadia who is just waiting to see Naina and her proteges fail. An ultimatum of final exams.
The practical jokes the kids pull to drive away Naina are fun and Malhotra makes sure they don't exist in vacuum. They tell her a few things about the kids and it becomes a learning experience for both the parties. There are some nice touches. The school principal, who has to manage Naina and Wadia, concerned but cynical. There's also a fun offhand moment where the staff room pervert is the teacher who is teaching poetry.
Malhotra also has two reflective sequences where the kids and Naina try to enter each other's spaces. When 9F's PTA meeting becomes a colossal failure, Naina flips the idea and visits the spaces occupied by her students. What was supposed to be a chance for the parents to get to know their kids becomes a chance for the teacher to get to know the life of her kids and their parents. As Naina's desensitising process becomes complete, the kids have their own. Their attitude towards her changes and Malhotra chooses to film their realisation and acknowledgement in a posh outdoorsy coffee shop, the kind of space inhabited by Naina. The setting plays up the drama, but it establishes the meeting halfway deal between Naina and her students.
For a film that surrounds itself with disability, social inequality, caste, class and something like Right to Education, Hichki does have a cookie-cutter approach. It deals with most of these issues at a surface level, hoping we'd buy into its good intentions and empathy signalling wisdom. Its characters are lovable and Mukerji comes up with an unfussy performance that goes a long way in keeping Hichki interesting. We throw around the phrase "well calibrated performance" but in the case of Naina Mathur, there might be something literal about that.
Tourette Syndrome isn't a visible disorder that one can understand and develop a method to perform. It is undefinable, and its tics can be intangible, so an actor can bring her own idiosyncrasies to the performance. Rani Mukerji seems to know when to let it play out, when her tics are pronounced and when to say something without an interruption from the tic. Hichki says the right things, shows the right things (there might be a redemption arc that is problematic in the end though) but it could have been more, a lot more.