Cast: Neil Nitin Mukesh, Mughda Godse, Manoj Bajpai

Director: Madhur Bhandarkar

Rating:***

Madhur Bhandarkar switches to low-key from his usual high-pitch, and turns effective. It’s his treatment that glosses over the fact that `Jail’ has neither a novel plot, nor denouement.

Parag (Mukesh) is picked by an anti-narcotics team in the worst possible way: there’s a stash of high-quality, high-priced drugs in his car, flung in the backseat by his flatmate, grievously injured in a shoot-out. The crooked dealer goes into the ICU, the straight tie-wearing young corporate goes to jail, and there they both stay, as the film winds itself onto familiar tracks: the innocent man trying to find his way around the claustrophobic confines of prison, his mother and girl-friend (Godse) doing their best to get him out with the help of a lawyer who’s more interested in his fees than oiling the creaky wheels of justice.

It’s a story that has often been told as a sub-strand in many, many films. Bhandarkar makes a whole movie out it, just as Nagesh Kukunoor did with ‘Teen Deewarein’, and Frank Darabont with ‘The Shawshank Redemption’. Given Bhandarkar’s propensity to gild every single lily in sight, this could have been a film where hysterical jailbirds are hideously tortured and abused, or deified beyond belief, forcing us to either cringe and close our eyes, or turn voyeuristic.

It’s not as if all this is missing in ‘Jail’. Parag gets his first lesson in prison discipline when the jailboss orders Nawab (Bajpai), an old-time inmate with no hope of getting out, to string him up and beat the soles of his feet with a ‘lathi’—standard pain dished out to new rebels to make them walk soft, and keep them in line. Parag is also thrown into solitary, the black, dank room, emphasizing his isolation.

... contd.