Implausible storyline, plausible result

In his recent interview with The Tribune, director Kanu Behl talked about how he felt the need to present his protagonist in ‘Despatch’ not as a ‘hero’ hero. Fair enough! He has the right to present Joy Bag (Manoj Bajpayee), an investigative journalist with a Mumbai newspaper called Despatch, as a Faustian character driven by personal compulsions and greed.

But writers Ishani Banerjee and Kanu Behl try too hard to make Joy a character not worth rooting for. He is insecure, gets violent with weak opponents, but whimpers when faced with powerful opposition.

They establish his negative traits right at the beginning. In one scene, Joy returns home late from work, after having a ‘quickie’ with his girlfriend Prerna (Arrchita Agarwaal) in the back of a car, to reluctantly join a party organised by his wife Shweta (Shahana Goswami). One of his friends tries to get him to eat a slice of pizza, forcefully. Joy resists, violently shoving him away. As he walks out of the party, the shocked expressions of his wife and the guests make him look uncaring, unfeeling.

What is baffling is what the three women — his wife, who despite his affair and all tries to save her marriage; his girlfriend, who ghostwrites a book for him; and a senior colleague Varsha Rajput (Parvati Sehgal), who is more competent than him, but is willing to share a byline for a page one story — see in him that we don’t.

Good girls like bad boy syndrome? Not applicable in this case. For one, all the characters are well past that age and stage. And two, Joy is not charming. Neither his demeanour, nor his behaviour — in or out of bed.

Equally baffling is the story he chases — the 2G spectrum-GDR case. As he goes about assaulting an accused in police custody to extract information, poses as a member of the Vigilance Wing to get information, grabs a flat in exchange for not covering a news story, the narrative gets all too complicated. As it meanders through other angles like Shetty’s murder, T20 franchises, shell companies, fugitive CEOs in the UK, and the Dubai mafia, there is an information explosion. Too many details with little coherence.

To make things worse, characters like a shadowy businessman (Kabir Sadanand) in London, a gangster (Salim Arif) and a lawyer (Dilip Shankar) appear from nowhere and disappear into oblivion, without giving us a chance to comprehend how they fit into the scam. Names like Wadhwa, Sylvia, Sundaram are tossed in the air. Are we supposed to know them?

A little bit of character building would have enhanced the viewing experience. Goswami is barely given any screen time, though her intensity still makes her stand out. Others are there to pander to the ego of this self-delusional man. Bajpayee effortlessly slips into Behl’s version of a hero the viewers should love to hate, but it does not help us feel much for the Rs 8,000-crore scam, or the journalist trying to unearth it. No, the ominous tone that cinematographer Sidharth Diwan tries to create by playing with light and darkness, does not help much. If Behl wants to make a larger point on freedom of press and the state of the media in India, that too is lost in the convoluted storyline.

An ‘unhero’ hero is fine if the storyline is griping, but two negatives do not always result in a positive outcome. ‘Despatch’ proves it.