Reminiscence : Why Dibakar Banerjee's "Shanghai" is so much more than just a good film.

It is uncanny how Dibakar Banerjee's characters can stay with you.

You are introduced to a seemingly harmless dope as he whistles while cradling a hockey stick and calmly discusses violence like it is Sunday brunch. As the gale of a dusty riot animates on the screen, Banerjee, with remarkable precision, builds himself an India within an India in a wink. It is a hellhole that you haven't seen but have heard about, have ignored, which exists somewhere in the badlands of the country you don't want to hear about.

Banerjee is the man. The auteur's fourth film is far from his best work and yet, the man has a voice worth hearing. Shanghai spooks and schools, and it is in this astute, irascible adaptation of Vassilis Vassilikos' Z that Banerjee bares his most commercial film. It is a cautionary tale or a film pretending to be one, but it works so beautifully on both levels that you don't care. It is a film so shameless, so rasping, that it begs to be watched. It needs to be watched.

You hang on. It takes its own sweet time to flog. 

I have always tagged Banerjee - and quite obdurately, I might add - as the the finest working filmmaker in the Hindi film industry. He has painted portraits of the Indian middle class, shot a film on video camera in its entirety and gave us a political drama raring to point fingers. It is his recherche ability of accurately assessing people and situations and turning it into his advantage that makes him a budding talent. Because in his films, the characters aren't caricatures. We are not watching people whom we can't relate to, whom we don't know. These people are us, and this precise element makes Shanghai a spook story.

In the simplest words, it is a film about a country trying to be taken seriously. Loyally following the words of Vassilikos' novel, Banerjee aptly constructs and dissects the ideologies that have been plaguing India for months. 

It is not a film that inculpates, not directly, at least. It is not a film that seeks to change the situation the country has got itself embroiled in. It only enthusiastically wants to paint a splintered picture of a shriveling economy and steps back to let you be the judge. That's a different thing. It is not an anarchistic film, though bleak, though angry, though indignant, it is not.

Anyone who has read the novel or seen Costa Gavras' brilliant 1969 adaptation of the same knows how everything is going to pan out in the end. For me, there wasn't any concluding revelation waiting, you know, I just knew what the film was leading to. Shanghai, for me, was not about the suspense as it was for a majority of those ninnies who hadn't been an audience to one of the most relevant political films of the last century. And yet, even with the suspense killed, I gasped at the right places. Because Banerjee, ever so coolly, showed me how small an entity I am in a democratic country that secretly aspires to be a powerhouse on the global platform.

Of course, having lived in the birth country of a film industry obsessed with minting money, we're not accustomed to nurturing films that give us food for thought. And if that is why some of you have lightly dismissed Shanghai as simply being a good film, I ask of you to watch it again, think deeper, ponder. 

It may not be a film that entertains, but is a film that illuminates. In any film industry, that is a rara avis.