Vedaa, the hard action surface separates a solid plot

Nikkhil Advani’s Vedaa is perhaps his best work to date. It’s gritty and hard-hitting, with John Abraham playing a farmer-mumbling Rambo on a vengeance that leaves many maimed and dead.

At the end of this breathtaking tour through the ruins, which ends in the ransacked corridors of a courthouse (order, order!), we are left with a feeling of anger.

Vedaa will leave you angry at the end, angry that such injustice still prevails in our country. That Dalits are being deprived of their basic rights by kangaroo courts run by a mofussil mafia. In the film, Abhishek Banerjee and his uncle Ashish Vidyarthi strut around like a law unto themselves. Those who do not follow the rules are given a “suitable” punishment.

All this may seem like old-fashioned theatricality to those who live far away from rural (read: real) India. But the heart of the country still beats to the rhythm of brutal injustice.

Nikkhil Advani and his writer Aseem Arora comb through the carnage with convincing impunity. Much of the action is played out in Stallone style: stealthy movements, slit throats, the lot. I find this a deliberate subversion of genres where inequality meets its ‘mathematics’.

It’s a kind of heady and largely stable mix of Article 15 and Rambo, bringing about a massive upheaval that’s still stable.

Much of the film’s muted, sublinear life comes from John Abraham, who, true to his image, rarely speaks. John has made a career of letting his fists do the talking. And when a gun is placed in the fist, the rage-fest that follows is devastating. This is a path John has trodden well.

Director Nikkhil Advani gives his lead actor the role of a lifetime. Unlike Satyamev Jayate, for example, where the plot was strikingly selfish, Vedaa breathes the scent of deep pain.

Sharvari in the title role becomes a symbol of centuries of wounded pride and barbaric oppression. There is a beautifully written sequence in which a man who dares to fall in love with a woman from a higher caste is publicly humiliated.

The violence in moments like these is more emotional than physical. Advani shows us how quietly the whip is wielded by the powerful. The bond that is seductively brewing between the simmering mentor and his restless protégé remains unexplored: there are too many burning bridges to cross, too much blood to walk over, for a lasting relationship to grow between the oppressed naive woman and her enraged mentor.

Yet, without even trying, John Abraham and Sharvari will remind you of Clint Eastwood and Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby. When they’re not on the run (which is very rare), they circle each other, wondering what’s underneath.

In a film that is underscored by gravitas, I wish Advani had avoided that awful Mouni Roy item song. As she sings and sways about her lover who can’t make her happy with a distrustful posse at her heels, you realise why a society built on inequality can never change. Even those who try to bring about that change can’t help but objectify women.