Lantrani (2024) Movie Review: Awkward, Misjudged Anthology-Look At A Broken Republic

Bringing together three reputed directors, Gurvinder Singh, Kaushik Ganguly and Bhaskar Hazarika, Lantrani cracks open the fissures in the Indian democracy, in narratives running the gamut of media circus, judiciary and shambling bureaucracy. The anthology, by default, is a mixed bag. It means films bunched together in the format invite a fate wherein one is pitted against the other. Occasionally, there are unifying threads or thematic resonances bridging the stories but often they become a punching bag for eclectically grouped directors to make their bid for accessible storytelling.

The new Zee5 anthology, Lantrani, suffers from the problem of having the most unusual choice of directors put together and bulldozing unique, exciting individual affinities for the purpose of servicing a standardizing template. The result is an ungainly blend of films, all of whose specific eccentricities are razed in adherence to a common screenwriter, Durgesh Singh. It is the acclaimed Punjabi director Gurvinder Singh’s film, Dharna Mana Hai, that is only fleetingly able to hint at snatches and glimpses of its maker’s recognizable interests.

Dharna Mana Hai is undoubtedly the most ‘mainstream’ Singh has ever been in a career that has largely swerved to capturing the tense, precarious atmosphere of his state, frequently evoking tragic power and personality from the rawness of everyday faces as evidenced most brilliantly in his 2011 film, Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan. In this short, he works wonders with the casting of Nimisha Sajayan and Jitendra Kumar as a rural couple who move to a footpath outside the district development office and stage a silent protest.

With the most minimal use of dialogue and their resplendently earnest faces, the actors deliver lived-in performances brimming with dignity and sincerity. Sajayan plays a Dalit wife, Gomti Devi, who has been denied her rights despite winning her panchayat elections. The other village heads have refused to let her open a bank account and thereby stall any possible government funding for development that she could rally for. The couple’s protest is to bring attention to the village and speed up Gomti’s access to her powers.

Through placards, they articulate their story to any interested passerby in spite of being reminded it is a brute, loud force that gets things done. It’s a sobering portrait of tenacity and the gaping dissonance between the many worlds lodged within a single nation, Singh’s film is the one that rings the truest in the lot, especially in the quiet, striking admission of how those disparate worlds are often ill-equipped to speak to one another.

While the humor doesn’t always land, some thoughtfully conceived sequences, including one where the cops take out the couple on a visit to a theatre, restaurant, and a mall and spaces where they couldn’t be more disconcerted and another circling the district officer’s attempts at dialogue with the village heads, tell us this is a director conversant with the texture of his narrative. However, the coda that rushes through several years and the final slow-motion shot recourse adds an excessive artifice, divesting it of a poignant, well-earned triumph in resilience.

Bengali director Kaushik Ganguly’s short, Hud Hud Dabang, revolving around a low-level cop (Johnny Lever) who is tasked with escorting a prisoner (Jisshu Sengupta) to the court, works better as a small parable but goes way off the mark when it tries to insert heavy-handed conversations around prejudice and discrimination. The cop has never been on a big assignment and, as he himself wistfully remarks, has spent most of his life maintaining things, be it tending to his station or family.

So, a newly bestowed gun becomes his most prized possession, with him latching onto it with great pride and care, occasionally flashing it in self-aggrandizement. But he still has to make do with a rope in place of handcuffs. While the early portions of the short have a rootedness to them, the film spectacularly fumbles in a central court scene that inelegantly verbalizes the discourse of bestiality linked to queerness, bunging in a politically loaded symbol as a cow no less. Ganguly’s short is tepid and colorless, marred by extraneous scenes drawn from the elements of the gun and rope.

Assamese director Bhaskar Hazarika’s (popularly known for his superb, gracefully unnerving 2019 film, Aamis) Sanitised Samachar fares the clumsiest in its amateurish pitching of artifice and ludicrousness that has quickly become synonymous with journalism, which is pushed to displaying clownish extremes to attract viewership and keep sponsors close. Set during the pandemic, the film circles a hard-pressed news channel that has landed a seedy sponsorship deal for a sanitizer. But the team is critically understaffed, and their most visible, influential face, the anchor, is covid-positive.

The sponsor, who is masked in darkness, is stubborn about wanting the anchor to promote it. Inherently, the film is designed to be a demonstration of inanity that has come to surround journalism, but Hazarika falters in translating its mindlessness, lazily registering it as a series of shoddy sketches. There are jokes made here about ‘wheelchair journalism’ and jobless acting school graduates investing too much truth in a small gig. Goons demanding overdue rent also make an entrance. Unfortunately, all of it is rendered in the humor of a garish, poor taste.

Such a unique combination of directors should have brought more spark, but their talents seem to be flattened into a dull, diffuse pile, unsure of tone and consistently resembling a fish out of water in their handling of the narratives. Lantrani leaves you wishing the filmmakers had worked with their own stories.

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Lantrani (2024) Movie Links: IMDb
Lantrani (2024) Movie Cast: Jitendra Kumar, Nimisha Sajayan, Johny Lever
Lantrani (2024) Movie Genre: Drama | Runtime: 1h 39 Mins