New Delhi: The end of journalism is now a fashionable lament. The semantics of this lament gets turgid and relentlessly grim expression in Kanu Behl’s new film Despatch, written by him and Ishani Banerjee. The woman writer is important in this film.
The journalistic ordeal that the film hinges around, obviously inspired by the real-life case of the shooting of MidDay journalist Jyotirmoy Dey in Mumbai in broad daylight a few years ago, has less clarity and heart in the story than the man at the heart of the drama: Joy Bag performed with intuitive intensity by one of India’s greatest, Manoj Bajpayee. Joy inhabits a self-loathing, mysogynistic cauldron — a deeply flawed man, the kind which the Internet has been nebulously branding “toxic masculinity” for some time now. Cinematographer Siddharth Diwan conjures a Mumbai that mirrors that cauldron with overpopulated, dimly-lit oppressive frames.
Journalism continues to inspire filmmakers in the most binary of ways — either caricatures that have no resonance with real-life journalists or morally limpid heroes who care about the larger good more than themselves. Despatch does neither. The screenplay is tilted more towards the impulses that drive Joy — the bed as a transactional, venting space where the heteronormative man, enmeshed with family values, emotionally clogged-up, acutely fearful of criticism, failure and women with voices and minds of their own, finds ways to ventilate his internal agitations through aggres.
