In Pursuit of Meaning and Masculinity
Like most independent dramas, Jaggi is a little too conscious of its nihilism. One could say it’s over-directed. For instance, the sound mix is almost intentionally tacky in its pursuit of hinterland rawness. The voice-over is abrupt and echoey, like it strives to be a disorienting metaphor. The camerawork is perceptive but doesn’t always quit while it’s ahead – some shots are longer and grimmer than they should be because the craft is stubborn about its film-school-styled grit. The acting, too, tends to look strange in its pursuit of naturalism. Ramnish Chaudhary is excellent in his body language and transformations, his depiction of wilting masculinity – school-boy Jaggi and dropout Jaggi, only four years apart, are virtually unrecognisable from each other. But a lot of the film’s dialogue delivery is deadpan for effect. Most of the issues circle back to the dubbing, which tries to achieve a kind of arthouse dissonance between being and speaking. You don’t need a movie like Jaggi to be technically disruptive, and yet it goes out of its way to remind us of the Punjab distorted by mainstream pop culture.
Speaking of which, I like that some elements of Jaggi bring to mind the more contemporary postmortems of the state. The investigative gaze and stigmas aside, the mother’s raging affair evokes Kohrra (2023), a series in which Barun Sobti’s cop character is regularly sought by the oversexed wife of a brother to whom he is indebted. The confrontational tone of this film – where the self-righteousness of society is inversely proportional to the open repercussions of sexual subjugation – evokes Amar Singh Chamkila and the ‘crude’ lyrics of the musicians who are shot for being the messengers. Jaggi’s is precisely one of the many vignettes mined by the controversial singers. The arrival of a fiancèe in Jaggi’s life – a companion in his trauma but also an escape from it – summons an arc of Joyland, Saim Sadiq’s lovely rumination on the main-character energy of manhood.
Jaggi is starker than these titles, and uncompromising to a fault (a montage features the boy desperately trying to stroke himself to an erection). But perhaps the provocations are, for once, the actual message – it is the language of the environment the film deigns to indict. After all, it’s Jaggi’s struggle between physical visibility and social invisibility that defines his tragedy. The film strives to be a bare body; there’s no room for a heartbeat.