Review: Thar
A suspenseful, dusty, neo-Western, small-town noir drama is what perfectly describes Thar. Directed by Raj Singh Chaudhary, the film dominates with a rape-revenge narrative on one hand. On the other, it’s a period police procedural that gets hijacked by a cold-blooded revenge drama.
Set in 1985, in a village called Munabao, where time almost stands still; a veteran cop, played by Anil Kapoor, sees a chance to prove himself after a murder shakes up the village. This sends him into the gruesome underbelly of the town, as he attempts to uncover a torture plot.
This film also reminded me of the iconic film Sholay. It has a Basanti (Fatima Sana Shaikh), a Gabbar (Harshvardhan Kapoor), and a Jai-Veeru (Anil Kapoor). In fact, There’s a Sholay reference midway through the film as well. The chase is afoot, and the inspector wonders aloud whether the perpetrator is Gabbar Singh, or if it’s maybe one of the ‘good guys’: Thakur, Jai, Viru, Ramlal, or even Basanti.
Anil Kapoor and his son, Harshvardhan Kapoor in a still from the film.
Anil Kapoor and his son shine in this Western. Harshvardhan remaining largely impassive throughout, uses minimal expressions which work in his favor. However, mind you, there is a lot of bloodshed and gore that dominates the narrative of the film. Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap is credited for writing dialogues for the film. However, in his ‘bloody manner’, the dialogue seems a little incomplete – it feels like he’s added lines just for the sake of it to make the film a whole circle.
However, there is a lot that also stands out in the film. A scene where a sub-inspector (Satish Kaushik) admits that his uniform hides his (lower) caste is disarming, for it reflects the contradictions of a country that’s forever striving to shed its postcolonial trauma by manufacturing its own.
The setting of the village is also done very well. It has everything - the dacoits, the assassinations, the casteism, the drugs, the cross-border hostility. Vast dunes, arid deserted landscapes with close-ups of the weathered faces of its residents, and a water buffalo decomposing on the cracked earth, dominate sequences. The pitiless, parched landscape along with these elements all suggest a kind of purgatory, where men and women must sin and suffer.
Director Raj also uses sudden jolts throughout the film. One of my favourite scenes in the film is the end - we get an aerial shot of the landscape with bodies strewn across it. Which suggests the insignificance, in the larger scheme of things, of these skirmishes of good and evil. Eventually, everyone is dust.
You can watch Thar on Netflix India.
