Naina (Rani Mukerji) has been job-hunting for the last five years. A part-time animator, she wants to be a teacher. But like her father (Sachin Pilgaonkar), no Mumbai school will accept her for who she is: an adult suffering from Tourette syndrome, a neurological condition that materialises in speech defect. Based on the novel Front of the Class by Brad Cohen, Hichki aspires to be a realistic drama, which seeks to understand the interplay between the individual and society. It is a subject worth exploring, especially in a country like India where a person’s fate — decided by such factors as social standing, affluence, or success in an entrance exam — is sealed much before she can mould it.
But Hichki, directed by Sidharth Malhotra, comes from Yash Raj Films, a production house typically known for making high-budget movie that have kept afloat the notion of an upper-class, casteless India for long, where everything is so sanitised and pretty that the films’ aesthetics don’t seem to imitate life but mock it. Hichki’s inadvertent intention, in that sense, is to prick a Yash Raj India.
If Naina craves acceptance, then so do the students in 9F, a class reserved for impoverished children in St. Notker’s, the only school that offers her a job (conveniently named after the Swiss poet who was known as “Notker the Stammerer”). For them, attending school has only become possible through a government act, Right to Education, but that hasn’t dissolved discrimination, practiced both by teachers and students; as a result, they’re resentful and hostile and uncooperative. Naina is not just their newest teacher but also their latest victim.
A drama like Hichki, by virtue of its predictable happy climax, is spoiler-proof. You know that all will be right by the end of the film. So, in such a case, the film is its journey. And that journey is shaped by its characters. This is where Hichki falters. It’s a world that is almost always divided in two neat parts: inside and outside, sympathetic and apathetic.
Early in the film we meet Naina’s father who divorced his wife because he was embarrassed of his daughter. His callousness, even years later, is evident; he orders food for her at restaurants, tells her to abandon her dream of being a teacher, believes she can’t go far with her condition. Naina’s mother (Supriya Pilgaonkar) and brother (Hussain Dalal), in sharp contrast, support her. This model repeats at the school, where there’s an understanding principal (Shivkumar Subramaniam) and a condescending teacher, Mr. Wadia (Neeraj Kabi), whose contempt for Naina and her students is so constant that he’s no less than a villain.
These characters are designed to make us ‘feel’ for Naina and her students. They exist because they can be simplistically identified as the cause of a bigger and complex social problem, as people who can be reformed. The film remains oblivious to the fact that Naina and her students are inherently disadvantaged — with or without the stereotypical nemeses — and that they’d have to earn small victories at every step. Hichki, like many Hindi films, is caught in a tussle between cinema and life. It takes a serious problem, which offers no easy solutions, and dresses it up to look cinematic and feel dramatic. The latter is achieved through simplistic characters, the former through dumbing down education.
So Naina tells one of her students, who is adept at calculations because of a betting habit, that he can excel in math and later become an investment banker. But equating quick calculations to mathematical intellect is a misleading (and patronising) assertion, especially to a ninth grader. Similarly, her other methods of teaching — taking the kids to a baseball court to make them understand potential energy or throwing eggs at them to introduce them to parabolic curves — are absurd and, in fact, does great disservice to the otherwise hard work put in by many students and teachers in schools across the world. This is education filtered through a Yash Raj lens, where enough amount of interestingness solves a problem.
Malhotra has all the rights to make an enjoyable, compelling film on a long-standing problem, but he can’t enter a world, appropriate and distort it, and leave us with a convenient, happy ending. The real story here is of the ongoing struggle — of vanquishing the expectation of same social and economic sameness, of lacking a solid foundation in education to mastering Planck’s equation in a few months, of recognising that slotting students into sections on the basis of their grades is just another form of segregation — that he has limited interest in.
Much of the film is set in the school campus, but its actual world lies beyond it, in Naina and the kids’ homes. But when Hichki literally ventures out into the slums, it films that portion with a confused outsider’s gaze. The kids’ lives are cursorily dealt with and their parents look like disembodied talking heads in a documentary. That slowly starts to improve by the end of the film but by then it’s too late.
If Hichki has entertaining and heartfelt moments it’s due to its actors who, even though saddled with unimaginative roles, try hard to rise above the material. Most of the kids play their parts with credible nuance and Mukerji is an assuring anchor. But they can only do as much in a film that sees this world through temporary binoculars.