‘Stolen’ Embraces Contemporary India With All its Faults and Messiness
Karan Tejpal’s Stolen might look like a thriller on the surface. But if one pays attention, it reveals itself as a survival film.
For the uninitiated, a survival film is a subgenre of films telling tales of a character surviving an adventure gone awry. In Stolen, the misadventure entails residing in India in the 2020s. A nation with obscene inequalities, a broken law-and-order system that couldn’t be less bothered about the people who need it the most, and a culture that is a sinister concoction of ancient traditionalism and new-age apathy – India in the 2020s is a whole new beast. It’s a place that has picked up the vocabulary of empathy, privilege and virtue-signalling from the West, but one where fans of a cricket team throng a stadium and remorselessly stomp over dozens of people – as a part of their ‘celebration’.
It’s where parts of a country insist on organic vegetables and alkaline water, while in another, farmers kill themselves after being unable to procure water, or a fair price for their produce. It’s a country where a routine police complaint or a witness statement can become a life-long trauma in a close-up, and seems like a dark comedy in a long shot. In this country, anyone who thinks they can imbibe a few bookish ideals and implement them in an ordinary day of small-town India, is being too naive. The closer one gets, the more India can seem like a labyrinth – with each corner springing a surprise. It’s something Tejpal’s film knows all too well. Hence, it doesn’t claim to know how to ‘solve’ it – instead stressing on what one can do with their limited intent.
Jhumpa (Mia Maelzer) is one of the countless people asleep on a bench of a platform in a nondescript railway station in Northern India (the dialect suggests Haryana). Next to her is her five-month old infant, Champa. In the film’s first scene, a veiled woman – the only one awake on the platform — steals the infant and flees. While running, she bumps into a train passenger, Raman Bansal (Shubham Vardhan), who has gotten off a train to attend his mother’s wedding. Raman’s brother Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee) is asleep in the parking lot of the station, having driven there in the dead of the night to pick him up.
When Jhumpa wakes up a few minutes later, and can’t seem to find her infant daughter – all hell understandably breaks loose. She alleges Raman stole her child, who is holding a pink beanie, which fell from the baby when the thief bumped into him. A mob gathers around them, and like it happens in India’s smartphone revolution, people start recording the confrontation. It takes Gautam to diffuse the rising tensions, when he asks a simple question to Jhumpa and the police constable nearby – “Would a thief stick around at the crime scene, holding on to evidence that will implicate him?”
Something Tejpal’s film does exceedingly well is layer the exposition into throwaway lines of dialogue without drawing attention to themselves. In the first five minutes, it’s established that Gautam and Raman have a Shashi Kapoor-Amitabh Bachchan dynamic from Deewar (1975). Gautam is the pragmatic business-owner, while Raman is the idealistic photographer. Raman is painted by Gautam as someone who indulges his bad mental health (‘I don’t understand this celebration of depression’, he says), and feels things a little too strongly. On the other hand, Raman can’t understand Gautam throwing money at all the problems he encounters, and someone so consumed with his sheltered life and his efforts to preserve it – that he couldn’t be bothered about even the most mundane acts of kindness and consideration.
A still from 'Stolen'.
It’s because of Raman that the two brothers get embroiled in the search for Jhumpa’s infant. He knows what Jhumpa has already made her peace with – the cops will probably do something to save face, but it will be too late to find her daughter. Gautam can smell the stink of the situation from far away, because he’s dealt with the twisted Indian law enforcement system more than Raman would know. He repeatedly tells him that this is a trap and they should walk away.
Both Banerjee and Vardhan have appeared in minor roles before and are painfully on-point as the two brothers, with entirely different skill-sets. While Raman is the empathetic social media warrior, out of his depth while trying to do the right thing, Gautam knows how quickly idealism can curdle into a witch-hunt in the hands of less-than-competent investigators, working out of their many ideological, social biases. Also, Jhumpa is a tribal, making the cops that much more suspicious of anything she says. Not only is she poor, but she’s also a woman. The slightest outburst as a result of her desperation and helplessness, means she gets labelled ‘hysterical’. Maelzer plays Jhumpa like an open wound of a character, impossible to look away from.
Tejpal’s film embraces India with all its faults and messiness, realising the many conflicts between the different social orders, schizophrenic ideologies, and a society where truth takes many forms. It’s an era where a growing number of people hold smartphones, without a hint of the wisdom to not get carried away by a WhatsApp forward and lynch people in broad daylight. The film delivers biting commentary on how these parts of India are ‘consumed’ from behind the safety of a screen. One of the film’s most tense sequences is viewed from inside the car, almost making us voyeurs to a crime. How does one react — put away the phone and pretend like nothing happened, or introspect about what they just saw?
A still from 'Stolen'.
As Stolen teases us with the bleakest of ends, some things are contrived in the last 20 minutes to make the climax hopeful. Slightly put off by the contrivances at first, I think I understood the reason behind them much later. Even in the starkest tales, maybe it’s the makers’ responsibility to leave people with a ‘moral’ that emphasises on doing the right thing, with the knowledge that it’s hard to do over a prolonged period.
In India, if you aren’t at the receiving end of the system, it’s probably because of blind luck or privilege, or both. Tejpal’s film wants to tell you that even if you can’t go around rectifying an impoverished country battling an identity crisis, when injustice stares you in the face, don’t look away. Despite what disenchanted voices will say, Karan Tejpal’s film is a reminder that despite all the bad faith around us, it can’t be an excuse to do nothing.
*Stolen is streaming on Amazon Prime Video
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