Serious men
director – Sudhir Mishra
To emit – Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Aakshath Das, Shweta Basu Prasad, Nasser, Indira Tiwari
While Netflix India has been busy projecting Radhika Apte as something of a mascot, it really should have been paying attention to Nawazuddin Siddiqui, an actor who has always delivered top-notch content for the streamer. His latest, Serious Men, completes a hat-trick of Netflix hits for the actor, following Sacred Games and Raat Akeli Hai. More of this, please.
Based on a novel by Manu Joseph, the film tells the story of Ayyan Mani, a Dalit personal assistant to a Brahmin scientist. After a lifetime of being called with nicknames like ‘idiot’ and ‘jerk’, she decides to channel her anger out onto the world by deceiving it. Ayyan begins a journey of upward social mobility by convincing everyone that her 10-year-old son is, in fact, a genius.
Watch the trailer for Serious Men here
It is interesting to note how director Sudhir Mishra’s perception of the common man has changed since Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro in 1983. While the two leads in that film were naive do-gooders with modest ambitions, the next four decades have made the common man angry. plus. apparently worthy of an equally infuriated movie.
Ayyan is a complicated guy. On the one hand, his fury is justified – he has been systematically oppressed by a nation that would prefer him to remain in his socio-economic position – but on the other, he is hard to please. Serious Men is, in many ways, a jailbreak movie. Ayyan is trapped in the metaphorical prison of Mumbai, the skyscrapers surrounding his chawl like bars in a cell.
As wickedly funny as the movie is, and as wickedly enjoyable as Ayyan’s plans to watch, Serious Men would not have worked if there hadn’t been a collective rage directed against the establishment. It’s a movie that captures what it’s like to live in India, circa 2020. It’s a time capsule that, like so many satirical movies that were released in the post-emergency era, captures the mood of the nation.
This is an awesome movie, one of those rare experiences where it seems like every department (wardrobe, sound, lighting) is on a jazz-like beat. This is ironic, considering the movie is also about how all these days seem to exist in echo chambers.
Nawazuddin Siddiqui is flawless in Netflix’s Serious Men.
While the biggest stars brag about physical transformations and surviving six-month boot camps, Nawaz glides effortlessly into his characters without even a hairstyle change. The way he can seemingly alter his physical stature, simply through body language, continues to baffle me. Here is a man who is neither diminutive nor imposing, but who through sheer acting can convincingly achieve both.
Serious Men gives Nawaz a chance to exercise both the submissive and dominant aspects of Ayyan’s personality. That’s the thing about class structures – you’re rarely at the top or bottom. There is always someone on top of you, waiting to jump, and someone below, ready to be attacked.
It takes four generations, Ayyan lectures his wife in an early scene, for a man to reach the top of the social ladder. He tells her that they belong to the second generation, which he likes to call ‘2G’. It is a generation that is incapable of having a good time. Your child will be in the third generation: highly educated and able to ponder the most important questions in life, such as why some condoms have dots. And his son, Ayyan’s grandson, will have nothing to work for and, in fact, no reason to work.
But the odds, Ayyan realizes, are against him. Society has barricaded every corner for men like Ayyan, almost deliberately, it seems. And so, Ayyan thinks, he must take shortcuts. Why should he follow the rules of a system that does not value him or his child?
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Serious Men is also a critique of the broken Indian educational system, as routine as the curriculum it prescribes, and an elimination of that old Indian tendency of parents projecting unfulfilled dreams onto their children. After a moment, it seems that Ayyan is not continuing with her big con for her son’s future, but to vent her own frustrations. It is a difficult tightrope to walk. One wrong step and Ayyan becomes irredeemable.
But Mishra and his team of four writers are not wrong. In an industry that routinely finds it difficult to produce tonally consistent films and that often views poverty through a romanticized lens, Serious Men is sharp from start to finish.
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The author tweets @RohanNaahar
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