Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Karan Tejpal
Starring: Abhishek Banerjee, Shubham, Mia Maelzer, Harish Khanna, Sahidur
Rahaman
"There are two Indias. Neither cares much for the other. But sometimes
they collide."
Those words open director Karan Tejpal's Stolen, a mystery wrapped inside a social drama wrapped inside a chase
thriller. Both the mystery and social drama ultimately give way to the
chase thriller, but while not exactly subtle, it certainly gets its
point across regarding the injustice of a class system that appears to
have left most people willing only to look out for themselves.
The film opens with the distressing image of a woman, Jhumpa (Mia Maelzer), having her baby snatched from her arms as she sleeps on the bench of
a railway station. When Jhumpa wakes up she understandably causes a loud
commotion, leading the police to intervene. Photographer Raman
(Shubham) is held as a witness, the infant thief having bumped
into him as he arrived on the platform. This causes much annoyance for
Raman's brother Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee), as the siblings are
already running late for their mother's wedding.
Following a lead, the police take the working class Jhumpa and the
middle class brothers to a desolate, abandoned building known to locals
as "The Cursed Manor." Its name proves prophetic as faith leads the
brothers to end up on the run with Jhumpa. Video of the brothers being
questioned by police has circulated on social media, leading the local
police to believe they're the ones responsible for the abduction of the
child, one of several that have occurred in the area in recent months.
To clear their name, the brothers must work with Jhumpa to find the true
culprit.
The expected culture clash is blurred by the fact that Raman and Gautam
are estranged to a degree. While Raman wants to help Jhumpa because he
believes it's the right thing to do, his brother only wants to save his
own skin. Things are further muddied by suggestions that Jhumpa may not
be all she claims to be, and that the child snatched from her arms may
not have actually been her own.
The bickering inside Gautam's SUV is offset by the external threat of
an angry mob that attacks the trio in set-pieces that wouldn't be out of
place in a Mad Max movie. As George Miller did with the first entry in
his franchise, Tejpal gets great value from a limited budget, creating
tense, adrenalised sequences that suggest Hollywood may come calling in
the near future if his film attracts enough western attention. Drones
follow the SUV through cramped alleyways and over sand dunes as hordes
of angry locals on bikes give pursuit, and our initial disdain for
Gautam gives way to our primal fear of being fingered for a crime we
didn't commit.
The final act sees the trio hide out in a nearby village, essentially
enemy territory. While Jhumpa heads off to find the stolen infant, axe
in hand, the brothers trade their western clothes for local garb in an
attempt to evade their pursuers. It's probably no coincidence that the
more of his western finery he sheds (beginning with his watch, then a
jacket and ultimately his entire suit), the more human Gautam becomes.
By the end, bloodied and muddied in a ragged kurta, Gautam is
indistinguishable from the people he looks down upon.
With Tejpal making his point in such visual terms, some of the film's
blunt dialogue comes off as redundant. Anyone with a pair of working
eyes will figure out the message Stolen is proffering, but
the script occasionally insists on spelling it out in the verbal
interactions of its central trio. But while the writing is rough around
the edges (some of this may be down to translation), Tejpal's filmmaking
is tense and enthralling. It's not always a smooth blend, but
Stolen is a rare movie that combines righteous social rage
with exhilarating thrills.
