Drugstore Cowboy… a quick-fix note on Dum Maaro Dum

There are many differences between Dum Maaro Dum and the last film that Rohan Sippy directed back in 2005, most noticeably being mirth… or the lack of it. Let not the promos kid you… Dum Maaro Dum is an angry beast of a film. Bluffmaster! had many moments of sheer cinematic ecstasy and a narrative that defined the word speed. Even in its quieter moments, and most of these were in the dopamine world of the romantic track that involved the lead pair, the film still had a trippy essence to it. The cinematic illusion, and allusion, both within the film and within the film in that film… had an euphoric flourish. The ‘trope’ was cinematic, but the ‘trip’ was beyond just cinematic.

It is a bit disconcerting at first then to get adjusted to the rhythms of Dum Maaro Dum and its narrative. For a film about drugs, the promos of which suggested a high-octane blast of cinematic verve that promised a cinematic ride, akin to Bollywood doing a line of Boyle if there ever was one for the English director’s fix of colour palettes and editing choices. Instead, save the opening credits where the film does seem like it’s inviting you into a haze of drug-induced daze… much of what takes place after that is resolutely serious. Serious of the somber and sober kind!

This proves to be the greatest, and most unexpected and unpredictable, of masterstrokes that Rohan Sippy affects the movie with. One could’ve easily fallen into the trap of using a film about drugs as an easy temptation and license to indulge in visual wizardry of the hallucinatory kind and a narrative that was fuelled with the non-directional rage of aimless teenage movies that seem to be the common malaise afflicting almost all of Anurag Kashyap’s recent works. Instead, Dum Maaro Dum takes a seat back and  breathes in long before it lunges forward with immense rage.

To the characters that populate Dum Maaro Dum, drugs are not an escape you see. It is a trap. Each one of the several wonderfully drawn out characters is trapped by it, in it and for it; starting with Prateik Babbar’s young Goan goalkeeper andUS scholarship aspiring Lorry. Despite the credits that would like you to believe that he is in a special appearance, Prateik’s Lorry is the innocence at the core of this dirty world. When the chances of having hisUS education funded in return for being a one-time mule to carry drugs across theAtlantic seem too tempting to let go off, Lorry rashly accepts the job and ends up paying the price for it. Joki, played by Rana Daggubati but definitely not voiced by him, has seen this earlier. The Goan example of a ‘susegad’ fellow, Joki stood by as his girlfriend Zoe (Bipasha Basu, looking so wow that it hurts) got embroiled in the nexus of drugs, becoming both a carrier and a user of it. Being unable to live with that guilt, Joki decides to prove Lorry’s innocence.

At the opposite ends of these characters, and the spectrum of their interconnected lives, are ACP Kamath (Abhishek Bachchan) and Goan tycoon Lorsa Biscuta aka The Biscuit (a screen-dominating Aditya Pancholi)! Biscuit is the overlord of the Goan drug trade, operating from behind the façade of being a respectable businessman. He even runs a DrugRehabilitationCenter. As one of the character says of him in the film (a superb Govind Namdeo in his best outing since Johnny Gaddaar), Biscuit has a cut in the sale of drugs and in the cure of it as well. In one of the two crisply written face-offs that Kamath and Biscuit have, Biscuit actually likens Kamath to merely being the other side of him in a coin. This makes sense when Kamath eventually chooses to save Lorry after having apprehended him first, in essence becoming both his captor and saviour.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, one fears that the film is risking derailing off its tracks when it starts to get concerned with the identity behind an unknown mysterious character called Michael Barbosa. It lingers on for far too long for its own good you feel, but the revelation (by which I don’t mean a revelation of the sorts that comes in a whodunit) of that angle and the resolution of it is so neat and brilliant… it lends all that has transpired until then with a gravitas that at once adds immense layers to the film.

One can’t really say much without running the risk of giving away the climax, but as things stand it is by far one of the boldest and cleverest endings to a mainstream film. But that brings me back to my first couple of paragraphs… and the concern of how ‘mainstream’ is Dum Maaro Dum despite its obvious packaging as such. It makes absolute sense that for a film whose characters do not look at drugs as the ‘cool’, ‘hippy’ and ‘trippy’ experience (even Kamath has a back-story that is like a bad joke played by destiny on the cop that Abhishek ‘acted’ as in the opening reel of Sippy’s earlier Bluffmaster!, and were that to be an actual character extended to this film), words that are commonly associated with these chemical opiates like euphoria, ecstasy, speed don’t mean anything to them. Instead, drugs to them mean a life, interrupted. And in that state of limbo, waiting to die physically after the soul has long died… regret, despair and anger are the only expressions.

Limbo is what most of these characters are in… even the otherwise-villain Biscuit has a genuine moment of feeling betrayed… and the feeling of being ‘lifeless’ is felt tangibly real for every one of them. Most of all for Kamath, as played effectively here by Abhishek Bachchan in a performance that exhibits rage of a different kind from the one he displayed in Raavan. This one is scarier, though subdued… perhaps his ghostly gait makes him the perfect fit for this role… but really, this is a performance that just gets better as the reels keep unspooling… emerging as one of his top three ones maybe by the time the film finishes to a whopper of a climax where the ‘ghosts’ become the only warriors to battle the ‘darkness’.

The film invokes ‘specters’ quite early on, and while Amit Roy is the apt cinematographer to supply the kind of moody lighting required for such invocations (as evident in his superior work in the Sarkar films), one still misses a Rajeev Ravi (for his understanding of psychedelic state-of-minds…Dev.D) or a Himman Dhamija even (for his uncluttered simple framings- Bluffmaster!).Roy’s camera at times tends to overact, almost like it fears that the actors are playing it too straight and it wishes to add their performances and the film that special dash of spice.

That, and the niggling matter of a Deepika Padukone showing up in an item song aside, Dum Maaro Dum is quite easily one of the finest Bollywood filmic experiences of the last year. Cinematically too, Rohan Sippy comes up with quite a few interesting devices to show passage of time or the choice of keeping the first half entirely non-linear (perhaps the only attempt at giving us a veritable withdrawal experience after a night of smoking joints where you try to piece together the memories of the previous night). Most audaciously though, he shoves what one would’ve guessed as an end credits song, Abhishek Bachchan’s rap-riff Thayn Thayn, smack in the middle of the proceedings and pulls it off admirably. The song of the film though is the one picturised on Rana Daggubati, Jiyein Kyun, which acts as the sad song to his character’s arc with that of Bipasha’s and then effortlessly adapts into becoming the angry motivator behind his resolve for Prateik’s Lorry.

You can take your sins to the grave and be buried with them… but in order to be cleansed of them, one must endure a trial by fire. Find out what this means when you watch the film and witness one of the biggest joints ever smoked!

- Abhishek Bandekar