Serious Men movie review: Furious and fabulous, Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s new Netflix film is one of the finest of 2020

Serious Men
Director – Sudhir Mishra
Cast – Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Aakshath Das, Shweta Basu Prasad, Nasser, Indira Tiwari

While Netflix India has been busy projecting Radhika Apte as some kind of mascot, it ought to actually have been being attentive to Nawazuddin Siddiqui, an actor who has constantly delivered top-tier content material for the streamer. His newest, Serious Men, completes a hat-trick of Netflix hits for the actor, after Sacred Games and Raat Akeli Hai. More of this, please.

Based on a novel by Manu Joseph, the movie tells the story of Ayyan Mani, a Dalit private assistant to a Brahmin scientist. After a lifetime of being referred to as names comparable to ‘moron’ and ‘imbecile’, he decides to channel his anger on the world by conning it. Ayyan begins a journey of upward social mobility by convincing everyone that his 10-year-old son is, the truth is, a genius.

Watch the Serious Men trailer right here 

It’s attention-grabbing to look at how director Sudhir Mishra’s notion of the widespread man has modified since Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro in 1983. While the 2 protagonists of that movie had been naive do-gooders with modest ambitions, the next 4 many years have made the widespread man angrier, it will appear, deserving of an equally enraged film.

Ayyan is a sophisticated fellow. On one hand, his fury is justified — he has been systematically oppressed by a nation that would like he stay at his socio-economic station — however on the opposite, he’s arduous to love. Serious Men is, in some ways, a jail-break film. Ayyan is trapped within the metaphorical jail of Mumbai, the towering high-rises surrounding his chawl like bars on a cell.

As wickedly humorous because the movie is, and as perversely pleasing Ayyan’s schemes are to look at, Serious Men wouldn’t have labored if there had not been a collective rage directed on the institution. It’s a film that captures what it’s wish to reside in India, circa 2020. It’s a time capsule that, like so many satirical motion pictures that had been launched within the post-Emergency period, captures the temper of the nation.

This is a surprising movie, a kind of uncommon experiences the place it appears as if each division — costumes, sound, lighting — is in a jazz-like groove. This is ironic, contemplating how the movie can also be about how everyone lately appears to exist in echo-chambers.

While greater stars boast about bodily transformations and surviving six-month boot camps, Nawaz effortlessly slips into his characters with out a lot as a change in coiffure. How he is ready to seemingly alter his bodily stature, merely by means of physique language, continues to baffle me. Here is a person who’s neither diminutive nor imposing, however by means of sheer efficiency can convincingly pull off each.

Serious Men offers Nawaz the chance to train each the submissive and the dominant features of Ayyan’s persona. That’s the factor about class constructions — you’re hardly ever on the prime or on the backside. There is at all times somebody above you, ready to pounce, and somebody beneath, ready to be pounced at.

It takes 4 generations, Ayyan sermonizes to his spouse in an early scene, for a person to summit the social ladder. He tells her that they belong to the second era, which he likes to name ‘2G’. It is a era that’s incapable of getting an excellent time. Their youngster will belong to the third era — extremely educated and able to pondering life’s greater questions, like why some condoms have dots on them. And his youngster, Ayyan’s grandchild, can have nothing to work for, and certainly, no cause to work.

But the percentages, Ayyan realises, are stacked in opposition to him. Society has arrange roadblocks round each nook for males like Ayyan, nearly intentionally, it appears. And so, Ayyan figures, he should take quick cuts. Why should he play by the foundations of a system that values neither him nor his son?

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Serious Men can also be a critique of the damaged Indian training system, as rote because the curriculum it prescribes, and a takedown of that age-old Indian tendency of oldsters projecting their unfulfilled goals upon their kids. After a degree, it looks as if Ayyan isn’t persevering with his grand con for the sake of his son’s future, however to vent out his personal frustrations. It’s a difficult tightrope to stroll. One false step and Ayyan turns into irredeemable.

But Mishra and his staff of 4 writers don’t put a foot fallacious. In an business that routinely finds it tough to provide tonally constant movies, and infrequently views poverty by means of a romanticised lens, Serious Men is sharp from begin to end.

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The creator tweets @RohanNaahar