Jaggi Review: Masculinity, Machismo and Pessimism in Rural Punjab

Director: Anmol Sidhu
Writer: Anmol Sidhu
Cast: Ramnish Chaudhary, Hasmeet Jassi, Harmandeep Singh, Gaurav Kumar

Duration: 114 minutes

Streaming on: Mubi

There are multiple long takes in Jaggi, Anmol Sidhu’s bleak and unsparing portrait of hypermasculinity and sexual repression in rural Punjab. But three of them stand out. The first one is the film’s opening shot. The camera refuses to leave the young protagonist, Jaggi (Ramnish Chaudhary), as he goes through a rollercoaster of emotions. A lot happens: He breaks down, tries to masturbate, grabs a gun, writes a letter, gets picked up by his uncle on a motorbike, and the man they offer a lift to begins to molest him. Jaggi’s face goes blank; you can tell that this is also the film’s final scene. The second one is the very next shot and the beginning of the flashback: A woman casually lets her lover out of the house before her husband and son (a school-going Jaggi) wake up in the morning. The third one is difficult to watch: Jaggi is raped by two seniors under a bridge after his impotence leads to rumours of being gay. It’s even harder to process: This is going to be the first of several assaults. The brutes ‘practice’ on Jaggi, holding his body hostage to the whims of their homophobia.

These three unbroken takes tell the story of a broken boy. The opening shot is essentially the effect, and the next two – a dysfunctional family; the bullying and abuse at school – are the cause. In each, the camera violates Jaggi’s space as if it were unwilling to offer him the respite of a cut. The gimmick supplies his psychological fragility in a culture that reduces lust to its most primitive and continuous form. What’s fascinating about Anmol Sidhu’s film is that even the male victim’s shame is guided by a sense of deep-rooted patriarchy and cultural entitlement. Jaggi is plundered by sexually frustrated men for years, but his rage is not reserved for them. (The one person he lashes out at is a hired farm-hand – lower on the caste and class ladder – who touches Jaggi after learning of his ‘reputation’). If anything, their vile microaggressions are taken for granted – inevitable consequences for a boy who instead blames his “lack of manliness” on the home that failed to course-correct him. 

Throughout the film, it’s the second shot that Jaggi internalises. He makes an extra effort to notice his mother’s transgressions – her spiking of their dinner every night, her slipping out of bed when everyone is asleep, her nocturnal terrace adventures with her brother-in-law, the vicious gossip in the village. In contrast, he normalises his father’s alcoholism. Carrying the impotent and bitter man to bed every night is a routine that Jaggi doesn’t question; he sees his own medical condition as a direct consequence of his father’s cuckolding. So when Jaggi’s marriage is arranged with a girl he starts to like, his fears are rooted in what his abusers might do to his future wife – mirroring his mother’s consensual ‘victimhood’ – and not what they’ve already done to him. Jaggi is worried that he might inherit the dishonour of his dad, a policeman who has failed to police his own family, while the lamb is destined to fall prey to the animals. In his eyes, it’s not the animals’ fault for being hungry. 

In Pursuit of Meaning and Masculinity

Like most independent dramas, Jaggi is a little too conscious of its nihilism. One could say it’s over-directed. For instance, the sound mix is almost intentionally tacky in its pursuit of hinterland rawness. The voice-over is abrupt and echoey, like it strives to be a disorienting metaphor. The camerawork is perceptive but doesn’t always quit while it’s ahead – some shots are longer and grimmer than they should be because the craft is stubborn about its film-school-styled grit. The acting, too, tends to look strange in its pursuit of naturalism. Ramnish Chaudhary is excellent in his body language and transformations, his depiction of wilting masculinity – school-boy Jaggi and dropout Jaggi, only four years apart, are virtually unrecognisable from each other. But a lot of the film’s dialogue delivery is deadpan for effect. Most of the issues circle back to the dubbing, which tries to achieve a kind of arthouse dissonance between being and speaking. You don’t need a movie like Jaggi to be technically disruptive, and yet it goes out of its way to remind us of the Punjab distorted by mainstream pop culture.

Speaking of which, I like that some elements of Jaggi bring to mind the more contemporary postmortems of the state. The investigative gaze and stigmas aside, the mother’s raging affair evokes Kohrra (2023), a series in which Barun Sobti’s cop character is regularly sought by the oversexed wife of a brother to whom he is indebted. The confrontational tone of this film – where the self-righteousness of society is inversely proportional to the open repercussions of sexual subjugation – evokes Amar Singh Chamkila and the ‘crude’ lyrics of the musicians who are shot for being the messengers. Jaggi’s is precisely one of the many vignettes mined by the controversial singers. The arrival of a fiancèe in Jaggi’s life – a companion in his trauma but also an escape from it – summons an arc of Joyland, Saim Sadiq’s lovely rumination on the main-character energy of manhood. 

Jaggi is starker than these titles, and uncompromising to a fault (a montage features the boy desperately trying to stroke himself to an erection). But perhaps the provocations are, for once, the actual message – it is the language of the environment the film deigns to indict. After all, it’s Jaggi’s struggle between physical visibility and social invisibility that defines his tragedy. The film strives to be a bare body; there’s no room for a heartbeat.