Yaara Is Garbled, Incoherent & Exasperating

Yaara(Zee5)

Starring Vidyut Jammwal as Phagun,Shruti Haasan as Sukanya,Amit Sadh as Mitwa,Vijay Varma as Rizwan.Kenny Basumatary as Bahadur,Sanjay Mishra as Chaman

Directed by Tigmanshu  Dhulia

Rating: * ½

Apart  from  some actors whom  we trust to deliver  on demand, there is   nothing in Yaara  to  invest  more than two  hours of our time  , in pursuit of some obscure  political ideology where Naxals are  the  victims  and   the police are constantly brutal.

 The  film has graphic gruesome  sequences of police  torture.  But nothing to compare with what  we go throught  sitting through a film that thinks dark is the colour that denotes  the  optimum  depth.Little do they know.When all you can see is crime as  a way out from oppression and  joblessness  for the young, then the social order needs  a shake-up.This film doesn’t have the  inner conviction to be  a wake-up call for a  social order based on discrimination.  It  puts  violent oppression on screen, but gives  no antidote to it.

 Tigmanshu Dhulia’s film  evidently adapted from a sub-standard French film(Les Lyonnais) builds its  bitter harvest of  bloodshed and  brutality around the  godforsaken lives  of  four friends.  Phagun(Vidyut Jamwal) and  Mitwa(Amit Sadh)  are  together  from childhood. There are major lapses  in continuity  , so we really don’t know  how Phagun and Mitwa  reach puberty,adolescence   and adulthood.The pair keeps hopping from  one era to another. The period is created  through sketchy  references, like the death  of singer Mukesh  which pops up from nowhere.

 The  editor(Geeta Singh) seems to have had trouble  putting the mess together in a semblance of coherence. The  editing  just  crashes after a point,   as we see   Phagun and  Mitwa clash and burn in a state  of socio-economic  intertia. They are  later joined by two more friends  Rizwan(Vijay Varma) and  Bahadur(Kenny  Basumatary). The  four actors seem to have been  given an identical directorial brief:  act tough and  macho, shoot guns  like  you’ve grown up watching  Quentin Tarantino’s cinema  and  act conflicted for reasons that are comprehensible  only to the director, if anyone at all.

Shruti  Haasan  is  woefully miscast as  a Naxal activist who gets  all our heroes  into  some serious deathly  trouble.She might as well have spared herself, and us, this ordeal. I came away from Yaara with neither  a  buddy-bonding  flick nor  a treatise on social inequality. I came  away from a film where  director,  known to deliver powerful statements on socio-political issues,  is just making the right noises  for  the sake  of staying relevant.Dhulia is  faking it here.