Jawan

Originally published on 11/09/2023 on Letterboxd

Don’t think I’ve had as much fun with anything in a theatre this year as I did with this sprawling, often incongruous ode to the living myth that is SRK. As with virtually any double role he’s played, Azad and Vikram Rathore are both simulacra and original, mentor and protege and- more explicitly here than in any other iteration of this duality- father and son. Notwithstanding the absence of any confrontation with the very foundation upon which that stardom is built (i.e. Fan), there’s something incredibly, undeniably invigorating about witnessing him inhabit the myriad personae that he seems to take as much delight in wrestling with as the audience does- terrorist, communist, patriot, undead warrior, enforcer of the law and- of course- a national symbol, something that he has embodied often to the effect of (knowingly or unwittingly) facilitating the interests of the Modi regime).

That very incongruity with the limitations of the personal and public that would constrain SRK from any genuinely instrumental political action, though, is precisely what makes this so exciting to watch- to see someone whose oeuvre you’ve grown up alongside rip away the onus of action from the very populace upon whomst policies like the CAA are imposed, and instead actualise the images of the outsider-as-terrorist that the BJP uses to push forward their fascism, turning them into weapons used by (an all-female, no less) squadrons originating from the very masses of the exploited that the government has fucked over time and time again (to an almost Stalinist degree). Perhaps it isn’t exactly novel for this kind of film, but I don’t think it can be denied that perhaps the actual Last Movie Star (forget Cruise) using such a carefully-constructed and precarious image to make a desperate plea for the audience to connect the film’s proletariat politics to the actual political circumstances that necessitate them is quite simply a tremendous symbolic action, especially when the most vampiric of the Indian media have gone to the lengths of attacking his family to try and tarnish that very image.

And then there’s the rhythm to this, which is really what makes this one of my favourite films of the new decade- there’s scarcely any distinct setpieces (with the exception of the train hijacking sequence, which is in and of itself a canvas for the dialectical montage continuing throughout the entire film). Instead, every bullet fired and every fist slamming against a face is part of a chronological continuum that spans generations and lives linked by tragedy, colliding against each other until the other direction left for that cumulative energy is catharsis of the most explosive kind. The image- or rather, sound- that binds these rhythms of daughters avenging their fathers and sons avenging their mothers is that of a gun jamming: the failure of the military-industrial complex to inflict the very punishment it is engineered to create, the limits of pacifism and the re-awakening of a feud written in the blood of a single family. That singular moment is the most moving thing I’ve seen in a cinema in forever- a masterful synthesis of the concerns with fatherhood embodied in influences like Gemini Man, Metal Gear Solid and SRK’s own filmography, but imbued with the relentless kineticism of the mass film.

I haven’t even touched upon how delightfully execrable of a bastard Vijay Sethupathi is in this, or how quietly devastating Deepika Padukone’s short-lived but instrumental appearance in this is, or the ways in which it grapples with the weaponisation of femininity in a way that a certain other explicitly feminist blockbuster this year didn’t even bother trying to address, but what I can say in such few words is that I am immensely glad for the father, son and Holy Spirit of cinema that is Shah Rukh Khan, without whom I don’t think I would have ever felt compelled to become as invested in this artform as I am.