There are some films which don’t have anything explicitly wrong. The acting is sufficient, the direction isn’t wobbly and the narrative is coherent. They succeed in conveying their intended message. These are straight-path movies, which get from point A to Z, without spinning in circles. But films, like life, are more about the unexpectedness of a journey than the novelty of a destination.
Three years after helming a film on the Kashmiri Pandit exodus (Shikara, 2020), Vidhu Vinod Chopra returns to the director’s chair with 12th Fail. The film is based on Anurag Pathak’s book of the same name and tells the real-life story of Manoj Kumar Sharma—a youth from a hamlet in Madhya Pradesh’s Chambal—who failed Class 12 and still went on to become an IPS officer. Chopra begins in the village, where, atop the terrace of a kuchcha house, a young Manoj (an earnest Vikrant Massey) is penning farrey (chits) for the upcoming board exams. Contrastingly below, his Quixotic father (Harish Khanna), who is a BDO, is chiding a postman for bringing him a suspension letter. He is being suspended for refusing to sign an illegal document and also smacking his senior with a slipper after being pressured to do so.
This is where Manoj’s psyche is, suspended between the idealism of his father and the crooked ways of the world.
The village sequences are shot like a 50s film. They sometimes feel archaic and skirt at the edge of becoming poverty porn. Other times, they ooze with an old-world charm, especially in a scene where Manoj’s grandmother presents him with her life savings. The sweet flute playing in the background and the soft lensing of these scenes reminded me of Satyajit Ray’s iconic Pather Panchali (1955).
As expected from the film’s title, Manoj flunks Class 12 after a local DSP interrupts the age-old practice of community cheating at his school. But the cop’s integrity inspires Manoj to go to Gwalior to study for PCS. Unforeseen events, however, catapult him into Delhi’s Mukherjee Nagar, the mecca of civil services aspirants. From here, the film traverses a path often taken. It frequently breaks into monologues to spell out the struggles of the underprivileged.
We see Manoj cleaning toilets, serving tea and crushing wheat in a claustrophobic pigeonhole but instead of feeling for the character we start getting desensitized to his ordeals. We don’t witness much of his internal struggle and as a character, Manoj seems to be only defined by his goal of becoming an IPS officer. Chopra, however, manages to dexterously capture the dizzying lanes of Delhi’s civil services hub. There are some amusing details like a salon offering different haircuts for IAS and IPS interviewees.
The world of 12th Fail exists in the shadow of TVF’s Aspirants. But while the latter series delved into the motivations of each of its characters, the film’s supporting characters feel stock. There is Anshumaan Pushkar as Gauri, the know-it-all veteran of Mukherjee Nagar, who reminded me of Sandeep bhaiyya from Aspirants. But Gauri only had the skeleton and not the muscle of the popular TVF character.
Another is the film’s narrator and Manoj’s friend Pandey (Anant Joshi), a tired cliché of the reluctant applicant, who is appearing for the exams at the behest of his strict father. Pandey’s voiceover for instance tries to make light of an otherwise dramatic plot but is mostly insipid. Medha Shankar Manoj’s love interest and fellow aspirant is confined to being the driver of his story and lacks a life of her own. Back in 2009, Chopra produced and co-wrote 3 Idiots, a comprehensive take on the lives of students, their dreams, needs and struggles.
The film made its audience swallow the bitter pills of college suicides, parental pressures and academic rat race while they were guffawing over its neatly executed gags. 12th Fail, unlike the Rajkumar Hirani directorial, takes its subject matter too seriously. It becomes predictable, clunky, even jerky. Like a Sisyphean car, going up the same hill.
12th fail
Starring: Vikrant Massey, Medha Shankar, Harish Khanna, Anshumaan Pushkar, Anant Joshi
Director: Vidhu Vinod Chopra