Narayan Kamble (Vira Sathidar), an unapologetic and radical 65-year-old folk singer has been arrested (read, “silenced”) in the middle of a fiery performance against the establishment. The charge is of “abetting suicide” as a drunk sewer-worker is found dead, as he entered a sewer full of poisonous gases without any mask. Pretty presumably, the darkest and ridiculous consequences follow to suggest that justice is the last thing on anyone’s mind in there. A well-bred defense lawyer Vinay Vora’s (Vivek Gomber) keen conscience often pushes him to fight for defendants like Kamble. He is a paragon of modern civility and sophistication who sips wine over Jazz music to discuss “humanity.” Up against him is the meticulous-monotonous public prosecutor (Geetanjali Kulkarni) boozing over anciently-stagnant laws; besides being a working mother, she is expected to cook meals and clean dishes at home on weekends with family to anti-immigrant dramas with nasty provincialism. Their witnesses frequently fail to show up, evidence goes missing, naive and confused witnesses are often lead away by prosecutors, investigation officers “hire” stock witnesses while Sharmila Pawar (Usha Bane) with a painful normalcy speaks of her dead husband and indicts how little anyone cared about him when he was alive but now the establishment is making a big deal of his death to silence “seditions.” Kamble’s life ebbs away in a series of dates and endless deferrals and he is left to stew in prison while the judge Sadavarte (Pradeep Joshi) goes for a summer vacation. And interestingly, none of them are stock villains holding personal grudges against Kamble but operate like the cogs of a wheel named establishment.
Thus, while the most brewed “types” in Bombay films are the half-baked-fantasies where courtroom dramas mean eloquent prosecutors, scandalous witnesses with last-minute exonerating evidences, Court (2015) is a bold satire with a slice-of-life documentary flavour that serves you the darkest comedy of the year. Chaitanya Tamhane shot his entire debut feature film in 45 days on location, during the vacations of April-May of 2014 with a cast accommodating mainly non-professional actors with five-minute-long shots. Thus, hard work won it 17 international prestigious awards already. Its razor sharp scripting began in 2013 (inspired by Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Office, 1966) and the gradual protest music by Sambhaji Bhagat (featured in Jai Bhim Comrade, 2011), powada (ie Marathi ballads), the Dalit issue, the leftist movement, the neglected sewer-workers slip in this multilingual cinematic rendition of a painful realism brings it all together. Tamhane’s evident fondness for the long takes to create an objective POV gradually became the language of the film, all enhanced by lingering edits. Similarly, the stately tableaux of 2.35:1 wide-screen visuals veer into the frustrating realm of procrastination. Tamhane tried making it apolitical but it started growing dark in many threatening sheds and so triggered his filmmaking philosophy.
The producer Gomber even prepared himself to face a ban as well, but instead, it is now the official nomination from India for the Oscars. All their hefty-hard work on this brutal comedy is really paying off.