Choked Movie Review: Fighting your inner DeMon

ChokedOn NetflixDirector Anurag KashyapCast Saiyami Kher Roshan Mathew Amruta SubhashRatingGuess any film mdash once public and therefore personal for everyone watching it mdash can be interpreted in multiple ways Depending on how youd like it In that sense Anurag Kashyaps Choked is a film that in my eyes deserves a firm place in history decades hence Pardon the bombast but in the same way that Garm Hava 1973 hasOkay seriously bit much no What could possibly be common between MS Sathyus classicmasterpiece and Kashyaps deliberately subversive lowbudget indie also for the most part set indoors within a particular familyhomeGarm Hava was arguably Indian cinemas firstmost direct response to Partition Choked set in the third financial quarter of 201617 mdash without ever being too clever by half about it mdash is the first Indian mainstream feature looking closely at demonetisation DeMon mdash undoubtedly the hugest selfinflicted crisis to hit India at least since independenceBy virtue of that fact alone it should survive as an important artifact given that guys in government associated with that fatal move themselves dont talk about it anymore And these are folks who write official historySo is Choked overtly an angrypolitical film Coming from Kashyap Mukkabaaz Gulaal Black Friday No Mere anger is a tweet no art Portions dealing with DeMon play out as a song And more so as sarcasmsatire surveying people who continue to praise their mushroomloving Prime Minister whose public image remains unblemished regardless of what he does for a livingYes this needs to be put on record too Let it lie on Netflix for the next century or soBut thats not really what the film is about It actually relates to a kitchen sinkpipe thats choking with moneycash Whose We dont know Is that why the films called Choked Think the title mdash therefore the pictures plotpoint mdash might have something to do with the act of choking that is failing in lifeRelate this to choking in sport Its when the player on the field just stops trying or moving beyond the safemundane So theres no question of winning or losing Contrast choking to panicking when unable to bear any more pressure the player gives the game away mdash playing rashly instead Read Malcolm Gladwells The Art Of Failure in the anthology What The Dog Saw Thank me laterWatch the trailer of Roshan Mathew starrer Choked hereOr just observe the married couple in this movie Whove seemingly failed at careers they had chosen for themselves And consequently the sort of life theyd hoped to share together Whether or not you can instantly relate their lives to the choked plumbing in the lookitchen the fact that you can relate to them at all is more fundamental to the film And you canBack in the 70s80s in an altogether another context the characters here despite live drumming for background score would have found their way into a Basu Chatterjee film Maybe Im saying this because Chatterjee 90 passed away on the very day I write this But theres no missing the subtle nod to middleclass cinema from three to four decades ago mdash of a housing society that operates more like an extended family where everybody pokesknows everybodyThat may or may not be true for Bombay per se If I close my eyes to imagine a Mallu guy though the image thats likely to show up is the curlyhaired bearded leadactor Roshan Mathews hes handsome so no knock on my Mallu friends calm down Saiyami Kher plays his wife and a cashier in a bank This is as good as Khers first film since I cant quite remember her from her debut Mirziya 2016 since very few might recall that poetry in loose motion anywaySolidly deadpan in her demeanour she pulls you into this plot keeps you hooked all through Hooks you up with the ensemble cast mdash Amruta Subhash in particular as the overdramatic neighbour stealing at least one psycho moment from Nawaz in Kashyaps Raman Raghav look out for it Youre fully plugged inWhat about the choked plumbing Frankly it wouldve remained a Charlie Kaufman type moviemetaphor for young people fighting demons within What demonetisation does to an intrinsically personal idea is introduce an asyet unspoken collective truth that usually elevates fiction to a defining story of our times The films end is extremely fuzzy But so was the end of the said selfgoalNext thing to happen after DeMon in this movie is a bank robbery Makes perfect sense Im told this script was originally written by debutant Nihit Bhave in 2012 So there are at least two people who benefitted from November 8 2016 mdash comedian Kunal Kumra whose DeMon gags made him a YouTube sensation overnight And evidently Kashyap Bombays ballsiest filmmaker mdash kahan milega aisa contentCatch up on all the latest entertainment news and gossip here Also download the new midday Android and iOS apps MidDay is now on Telegram Click here to join our channel middayinfomedialtd and stay updated with the latest news