Srikanth Review: Biopic for Dummies with Rajkummar Rao

Director: Tushar Hiranandani
Writers: Jagdeep Siddhu, Sumit Purohit
Cast: Rajkummar Rao, Jyothika, Alaya F, Sharad Kelkar

Duration: 134 minutes

Available in: Theatres

The older I get, the less patience I have for Hindi cinema’s biopic-for-dummies template. Actually, that’s not true. I’ve always been impatient with Wikipedia pages parading as movies. I’ve always been annoyed with Amar-Chitra-Katha-styled storytelling for adults. I’ve always been irked by algorithmic narratives with binary emotions. It has nothing to do with age. It’s difficult to be polite about movies that not only add nothing to remarkable real-life stories, they subtract the life out of these stories. Srikanth is another brick in that artificial wall. The biographical drama of visually-impaired industrialist Srikanth Bolla is so content with its subject that it’s bereft of curiosity, creativity and connective tissue. It is little more than a platform for Rajkummar Rao, whose performance suffers from the condition of looking like a performance. In this case, his face is also too familiar for us to suspend disbelief and accept Srikanth’s tics.

The treatment is flat and simplistic, almost as if the film doesn’t trust its hero to be naturally inspiring. The writing is such that, ironically, the visuals are pointless: If you close your eyes and listen, every character is a human questionnaire. You won’t get admission. But why, teacher? Because the law doesn’t allow blind students to study science. You can’t take the flight, sir. But why? Because airline policy requires visually impaired passengers to be accompanied by one person. You can’t work in America, Sri. But why? Because you can be a role model in India and change the system. I tried closing my eyes a couple of times, and it was like hearing an audiobook. At one point, I forgot to open them – for a while. 

Teaching Instead of Preaching

How does a film determined to normalize disability – Srikanth demands equal footing, not sympathy – manage to condescend on its own viewers? Every other moment is staged for the protagonist to teach the ableist world a lesson; every other scene is a contest that must be won by Srikanth. When a lawyer argues that Newton would’ve never discovered gravity if he hadn’t ‘seen’ the apple falling, Srikanth launches into a demonstration using his walking stick and math-brain. It ends with his victorious smile. When he isn’t allowed to board the plane to Boston – where he’s going to be the first blind international student at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) – he launches into a Chacha-Chaudhary-like demonstration in the airport hall to prove he’s capable of taking a flight alone. It ends with his victorious smile. If the weather were bad, he’d probably do an elaborate global-warming experiment in a park to humble the air. It’d end with a fist pump. It’s the kind of repetitive gimmick that places the underdog in cardboard situations only to highlight his smartness – and by extension, his disability. Srikanth wants to be treated as just another person (he even rejects a ‘special category’ award), but the film does the opposite. 

As a result, his naysayers are cruel in cartoon-villain ways. A potential investor mocks him (“at least learn how to handle yourself before handling a company”) for losing his balance while walking. Another group leaves in the middle of his laptop presentation – and he has no idea. Bystanders look away when he asks for help. People stop just short of cackling loudly and feeding him to crocodiles. Even Srikanth’s allies are one-dimensional. We know nothing about his teacher Devika (Jyothika), other than the fact that she dedicates her life to him. Ditto for his girlfriend, Swathi (Alaya F), who happily studies abroad after giving Srikanth the patriotic spiel about changing India. He is named after the former Indian cricketer Kris Srikkanth, but Srikanth’s cricket chapter is so mechanical – he gets selected in the national team but opts to study abroad instead – that it could’ve been a passing song. Or maybe it was. It’s hard to tell, given that not a single shot is allowed to breathe or unfold – a criticism that applies to most of director Tushar Hiranandani’s work (Saand ki Aankh, Scam 2003). 

Shortcut Film-making

Some scenes bend over backward to accommodate the shortcut film-making. When Srikanth is convincing future business partner Ravi (Sharad Kelkar) to invest in his kraft-paper business, two visually impaired beggars knock on their car window on cue so that Srikanth can declare he’ll give them a job instead. (That they nod their head and promptly leave is worrying because no numbers or names were exchanged). When Sri and Ravi later ask an electricity board officer to spare them the unpaid dues of the previous factory owner, a peon recognizes Srikanth and thanks him for inspiring his own son to study science. Needless to say, the officer changes his mind. When Sri encounters his childhood bully on a bus, the man continues to call him a beggar only to fall short of his own bus fare so that Srikanth can smugly lend him a coin. The wordplay is worse. Every other line tries to be a cutesy riff on blindness. Kanoon andha hota hai (the law is blind)? You got it. Blinded by love? Yup. Apple of his eye? Okay. A vision-ary? Fine. An entrepreneur with foresight? That’s right. 

A drone shot snaking through the halls of Srikanth’s American campus made me imagine a frantic honeybee late for class (or a spelling bee?). At a narrative level, Srikanth tries to be interesting. For instance, it isn’t entirely hagiographical. He is disillusioned by his country at first and, like Anil Kapoor’s character in Nayak: The Real Hero (2001), expresses his reluctance to shoulder the burden of talent; why attempt to revolutionize a system that’s so broken? But he changes in a heartbeat. All it takes to resolve his ‘selfishness’ is Swathi’s speech and his teacher’s sigh on the phone. Of all the ways in which he could’ve been transformed, this is by far the laziest. Similarly, the conflict in his journey – where he suddenly becomes bitter, arrogant and resentful of those around him – feels forced. It’s like Hiranandani simply imitates the conflict of his series Scam 2003: The Telgi Story to manufacture some stakes out of thin air. But the real red flag – apart from the relentless background score (which somehow diminishes the song ‘Papa Kehte Hai’ without remixing it) – emerges early in the film. A character is shown answering a phone call…in slow-motion. You know it’s trouble when frame-rate trickery is reserved for everyday actions. You know it’s trouble when an angry girl bids farewell to her visually impaired boyfriend with a cold “See you”. You also know it’s trouble when an exhausting film about an exceptional person dares you to judge it.