Everything wrong with A Thursday

Why I hated the film, as a viewer and a crime reporter

Film: A Thursday

Director: Behzad Khambata

Cast: Yami Gautam’s face in close-up, Neha Dhupia’s pregnancy, Atul Kulkarni, Dimple Kapadia

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Years ago, I remember reading a Mithun Chakraborty interview in a film magazine, in which he had said that Abhishek Bachchan’s biggest enemy is Amitabh Bachchan. A Thursday suffers from something similar. Its biggest setback is that it is a ‘spiritual’ sequel to A Wednesday, which was a revolutionary movie in its own right.

Even if nobody calls it a direct sequel, the similarities can not be ignored. The name of the film definitely does not help.

Just like Naseeruddin Shah’s ‘stupid common man’, Yami Gautam is a common person, a playschool teacher who takes a class full of children hostage and places certain demands in front of the police. The story goes forward from there but from the very first few minutes, it is impossible not to compare and draw parallels with the original.

And because we all know what happens at the end of A Wednesday, we already know that by the end of the movie, Yami’s intentions will turn out to be different than what they are being shown as in the beginning. I’m completely sure that the makers knew this even as they were writing the very first skeleton of the story, which is why I’m surprised that they went ahead with it anyway.

When you know that the shock value of your big reveal is already compromised, you compensate with something equally effective. Off the top of my head, I can think of the characters, the performances, or the execution. Unfortunately, A Thursday fails on all three counts.

The characters are okay, but there is nothing special in them. Neha Dhupia’s pregnancy is completely unnecessary, save for one dialogue between her and Atul Kulkarni, which, if omitted, would not have affected the film one bit. I fail to see why her character was made pregnant at all. Besides, the relationship between her and Kulkarni is too fantastical to believe or stomach for anyone with even a marginal understanding of a uniformed force. And this can not be discounted, because if you make a movie based on crime or policing, a large chunk of your viewership will be cops or crime reporters, who will lose interest the minute they see something like this.

Atul Kulkarni as a cop does not bring anything different to the table than what we have already seen from him, and definitely does not measure up to the menace exuded by Jimmy Shergill in A Wednesday. And if Dhupia was by any chance trying to emulate Anupam Kher in A Wednesday, well, she fails. Maya Sarao as the journalist is as bad an actor as Deepal Shah/Shaw was in A Wednesday. I’m pretty sure that the brief given to the casting director for both the roles in both the movies purposely said, “Should not be able to act.”

The execution, too, fails to impress. The makers try to paint a picture of the police force as an ultramodern one, with all the high-tech gadgets at their disposal that one can dream of. I would have actually loved to see a portrayal of how the Mumbai Police would have handled a hostage situation with the resources that they actually have. Research has clearly not been a priority here. And for some reason, the camera keeps zooming in on Yami Gautam’s face in random scenes, trying to make her look like a Ramsey Brothers character, whereas we know all along that she is one of the good guys.

But my most serious problem with the film is that, in the absence of a good story, characters, performances or execution that can set it apart from A Wednesday, it places all its bet on the reveal at the end: a reveal that has for centuries been used in popular culture to evoke sympathy from the audience. And that is the issue of rape.

There are several ways to handle this very sensitive issue in cinematic culture, and I see nothing in A Thursday that does justice to it. Instead, it feels that the writers knew beforehand that it was a safe bet, that not many would speak against it if they included this sacred topic. And the story goes one step further in exploiting popular sentiment by demanding death penalty for rapists.

It has for long been a subject of intense debate as to whether punishing rape convicts with death will act as a deterrent for potential rapists. As a young and idealistic college student, I remember being completely in support of the death penalty in rape cases. That point of view changed with I started working as a crime reporter, and I still stand by my amended opinion.

The biggest point that we seem to forget in this whole debate is that the victim or the survivor comes first. Hence, we need to always remember that her safety is of paramount importance. And if we pass laws guaranteeing death to rapists, this safety will be severely endangered. Because rapists, fearing that the victim will identify them to the authorities, might start murdering them after sexually assaulting them. And I have covered enough cases where the accused has murdered the victim solely for this reason, even when death is awarded only in the rarest of rare cases currently in our country.

Further, the strongest evidence in a rape case is the victim’s testimony. If death penalty becomes the norm in rape cases, the accused might start killing their victims simply to ensure that they don’t testify.

I, more than most, completely understand why a large section of our society believes that death is the best punishment for rapists. And this is exactly the sentiment that is exploited in A Thursday. The same sentiment that was observed when the Hyderabad police killed four men accused of raping and murdering a veterinary doctor in an alleged encounter in 2019. People across the country celebrated these killings, forgetting that an encounter killing is the easiest thing to do for any police force, while actually investigating a case, enforcing the existing laws and ensuring justice for the survivor is much, much harder but also the job of any law enforcement agency.

I would have loved A Thursday much better, had it talked about how we do not enforce our existing laws enough or aren’t strengthening our police forces enough so that they can crack down and even try to prevent such crimes. Instead, the movie takes the easy way out, much like so many other stakeholders in this issue.