Film: Class of ’83
Director: Atul Sabharwal
Star cast: Bobby Deol, Anup Soni, Joy Sengupta, Vishwajeet Pradhan
Rating: 3 Stars (out of 5)
At first, two things made me skeptical about Class of ’83. One, how many times can you go on watching movies on Mumbai’s netherworld of crime? We have lost count of how, just about every known and unknown film-maker, from Mani Ratnam and Ram Gopal Varma to Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Anurag Kashyap, has done it in the past? Two, how can the poor Bobby Deol (of the flowing mane and blue goggles fame), of all people, pull off something of this sort? Should he not have left something like this for his better-equipped and brawny elder brother, Sunny Deol?
But I must confess, director Atul Sabharwal’s Class of ’83, a joint collaboration of Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment and OTT behemoth, Netflix has surprised me on both counts.
Class of ’83 is not the typical, run-of-the-mill, cop-versus-gangster cinema, a genre used ad nauseam by Bollywood in the pre- and post-Mumbai riots years. It's a well-made movie with a touch of realism, which steers clear of regular tropes. And, much to my surprise, Bobby Deol, in his 25th year since he made his debut in Barsaat in 1995, delivers a nuanced and understated performance, which is diametrically different from anything he had one so far.
Based on a book by the best-selling “crime specialist” Hussain Zaidi, Class of ’83 is about an upright policeman, played by Bobby, who is on a punishment posting as the Dean of Police Academy in Nashik simply because he is not pliant enough to be part of the decaying system. How he converts his “punishment” into an opportunity with a well-thought-out plan at his institute and its ultimate outcome are what the film is all about.
Even though a number of films on Mumbai's encounter specialists from within the force, who raise private armies of the outlaws to carry out extrajudicial killings after felling shackled within the system, have been made in the past, Class of ’83 does not look dated because of a fresh and realistic treatment. The setting, the background, the characters and the writing all lend the authenticity to the film. Evidently, much of its credit goes to Zaidi’s book of the same name, which deals with the gangster-politician-policemen nexus in the Bombay of the early eighties.
Bobby plays a reclusive dean at the police academy where he spots five youngsters (Bhupendra Jadawat, Ninad Mahajani, Hitesh Bhojraj, Sameer Paranjape and Prithvik Pratap), whom he mentors and trains with a specific purpose before he lets them loose on the unsuspecting Mumbai police brass, the underworld and the unscrupulous politicians. It is his way of accomplishing a mission that he had to leave midway owing to the lack of support from his departmental bosses and political masters. Thankfully, director Sabharwal and writer Abhijit Despande have eschewed from turning their central character into a loud, teeth-clenching and jingoistic cop, who whips out a pistol every now and then with or without the slightest provocation. Instead, what we have here is a policeman torn perennially between his duties as a police officer and those of a family man. Needless to say, it is the family man that gets the raw deal.
As a middle-aged officer, Bobby has put in his career's best performance so far, both in emotional and tense moments. That is, mind you, a no mean task for someone who has to carry the image baggage of his past like the proverbial albatross around his neck all the time. Anup Soni, as the scheming politician, is impressive enough while the five debutants show immense promise for the future. Class of ’83, streaming on Netflix now, is definitely worth a watch along with family, even if you don’t want to touch any more cop-and-gangster drama from Bollywood with a barge pole.
