Criticism of serious men: Nawazuddin Siddiqui holds the fort as only he can

Discard: Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Indira Tiwari, Aakshath Das, Nassar, Sanjay Narvekar, Shweta Basu Prasad

Director: Sudhir Mishra

Evaluation: 3.5 stars (out of 5)

Ayyan Mani, the anti-hero of Serious men, is a Dalit Tamil migrant. He lives in a one-room apartment building in a residential cluster in Mumbai. In the last years of British rule, these chawls served as a prison. For the protagonist, the dark and damp house he shares with his wife and ten-year-old son is still a cage.

Ayyan, performed in a beautifully nuanced way by Nawazuddin Siddiqui, is determined not to let his son Adi (confident newcomer Aakshath Das) languish in the drudgery and disown his grouse wife Oja (Indira Tiwari) that nothing ever goes right. good for them. Ayyan’s hellhole is both physical and psychological. It reminds him of the oppression his family of manual scavengers endured for generations. He hatches a daring plan to get out.

Ayyan Mani’s story is funny and poignant in equal parts. Veteran director Sudhir Mishra’s animated vision draws on both the biting satire and spiky rage of Manu Joseph’s novel (Serious men, 2010) even though the script by Bhavesh Mandalia and Abhijeet Khuman deviates significantly from the written text.

Ayyan has a stable and salaried job at the prestigious National Institute for Basic Research. He is the personal assistant of authoritative and selfish Brahmin astrophysicist, Arvind Acharya (Nassar), one of the “serious men” of the title. Ayyan has no lost love for him. There are good reasons for his hostility.

Acharya is in a clandestine affair with an attractive young researcher – the alliance is, of course, an open secret among the scientist’s subordinates – as he works on a project to send balloons into space in search of microbes in the stratosphere.

Going back to Ayyan’s story, he moved to Mumbai with his father. He went to school, the first boy in the family to do so. He understands the value of education. But the story of the atrocities accumulated on his community still haunts him. He is desperate to give his son a helping hand so he can have a chance to live a better life.

If that sounds like the core of a powerful caste-themed tale, it sure is. It’s another matter Serious men does not exactly overlap with the entire theme – and all of its complexity. It settles for what is essentially a father-son drama set against the backdrop of India’s caste dynamics. In this narrow frame, the film works perfectly well.

Serious men takes on an overzealous electronic media, an education system caught up in merit versus reserve debate and political expediency, represented by a Dalit leader Keshav Dhawre (Sanjay Narvekar) and his daughter Anuja (Shweta Basu Prasad), a Carnegie Mellon graduate ready to advance family heritage.

In addition to an election ticket, the ambitious lady has her eyes riveted on a lucrative slum redevelopment contract. She decides to take advantage of the celebrity status of Adi, a child prodigy whose confident discourse on the mysteries of the universe and the natural world brings the media to her doorstep.

The Netflix movie, airing October 2, captures the agony, anguish and anger of a man who knows he is “a small molecule in this society”. He resorts to irreverence and subterfuge as rebellion. He seeks to overthrow the social structure that has put his fellow human beings in a corner and doomed them to endless misery. He is determined not to let his son be encumbered with social constraints.

But no matter how hard the book may have raged against systemic violence directed against humans treated worse than animals, it presents a view of the lower depths from a pedestal of relative privilege. There’s a seething fury in the narrative, okay. But Ayyan Mani is a man who got out of the quagmire. The worst he faces now are the bickering and haughty upper caste scientists of the institute and the gnawing knowledge that in order to get around the obstacles in his way he must bet on his own tricks.

Screen adaptation of Serious men therefore cannot be a serious competition with Fandry by Nagraj Manjule or Kastoori by Vinod Kamble, films made by directors from the social strata in which these burning stories are located. The strong organic tone of Fandry and Kastoori comes from dealing with lived experiences.

But once you get rid of those kind of expectations Serious men, The very first adaptation of a book published by Sudhir Mishra is no average cinematic achievement – it’s funny, sardonic, bitter, insightful and pugnacious all at once. It is photographed with flair by Alexander Surkala and embellished with a subtle and evocative background score by composer Karel Antonin.

And with Nawazuddin Siddiqui holding the fort as only he can and receiving wonderfully constant support from Nassar, Indira Tiwari, Aakshath Das, Sanjay Narvekar and Shweta Basu Prasad, this is a rare Mumbai film that addresses the caste system and its awful results. Serious men deserves to be celebrated for what it brings to the table.

Ayyan and Adi’s secret alliance aims to break down the walls that prevent the family from stepping out of their position in life. It is full of dangers because it is misleading. But for the protagonist, it’s a way of turning back on a company that committed much greater fraud on him and his ancestors. On a more mundane level, he hopes to bring joy to his wife by conjuring up a myth about their son.

Adi is making rapid progress as a “prodigy”. The media harass him, a political party wants a piece of him, and his school will do everything in its power to retain its star student. But those who prey on the boy won’t let him forget who he is – a genius from a very, very humble background. The political party that adopts Adi as a mascot is in Dalit attire. And the principal of the school, Sister Christie, asks her father to offer her a scholarship if the family is converted.

Ayyan sees his son as a ticket out of his lower middle class struggles. Her boss is also not averse to bending some rules. Yes everyone Serious men on a downward moral gradient, whether it is a high-level and empowered scientist or a humble government official who derives great pleasure from turning the tide on his upper caste leader at the earliest opportunity available. With varying degrees of power depending on their place in the pecking order, they’re all ready to manipulate the system to their advantage.

Serious men is a portrait of a minefield of a society delivered with a lightness of the touch which enhances its acuteness. More than just viewable, the film offers audiences a lot to think about.