There’s something about Karan Tejpal’s Stolen, that premiered at Venice, which has got film buffs and some of Bombay’s top filmmakers buzzing over it…
A still from the Amazon Prime Video film Stolen
Taut is a peculiar adjective. It means tight, of course. Somehow, I’ve never seen it used in any other context — say, relationships, shoelaces, pants, comic-routines…
The word only goes with films, for some reason — specifically, when you call a thriller, a “taut thriller”!
And that’s precisely the description I inevitably come across, among critics/content-creators, to do with the film Stolen (on Amazon Prime Video): co-written, directed by debutant, Karan Tejpal; co-written, produced by Gaurav Dhingra.
It’s set over a night in the boondocks of, presumably, Haryana/Rajasthan, with three leads: an impoverished woman (Mia Maelzer), whose child got stolen, while she was asleep on a railway platform; an affluent bloke (Shubham Vardhan), who was then on that platform; and his brother (Abhishek Banerjee), who’s come down to pick him up from the mofussil railway station, in the dead of the night.
Karan Tejpal, writer-director. Pic/Ferda Demir (right) Gaurav Dhingra, writer-producer. Pic/Rupin Mehta
This triggers off a series of wholly unpredictable events/incidences, unwittingly involving those two urban dudes, who were merely on their way to their mom’s destination-wedding.
How do you arrive at a taut thriller, so to say? I suppose by firstly trimming all the fat from the screenplay — that rarely, if ever, segues into detailed backstories, forget flashbacks for characters concerned. Viewer must join dots. Attention mustn’t waver. Plot’s the point.
So, for instance, while you can figure the underprivileged girl Jhumpa in the film is possibly a tribal; in a scene, she mentions Bonbini, who’s the guardian spirit of Sunderbans, spanning southern Bangladesh and West Bengal.
I ask director Tejpal, producer Dhingra, where she’s from. They tell me, “She was originally supposed to be from Bangladesh. But once Maelzer joined the cast, she suggested Santhal tribe [also, east].”
Maelzer had worked extensively with tribals there, practicing theatre, and felt could crack the character, convincingly.
Likewise, lead-actor Banerjee is Bong, of course, but he plays a Punjabi Bansal, and I wonder how he causally goes Bangla, on occasion.
Tejpal laughs, “We actually had a scene to explain that his wife’s Bengali. But that’d be unnecessary. Enough Indians speak multiple languages.”
Which is true. And, often, refraining from over-explanation is inherently respecting the audience’s intelligence, let alone patience.
From a metropolitan perspective, what squarely hits you in the solar plexus about Stolen is how believable the story feels, despite the craziness of it all.
Starting with street cops — Haryanvi, in this case, going, “haanvai” for ‘haan bhai’ — that, in some form, and sometime or the other, have been a nightmare for most people I know.
Tejpal has stories from previous shoots. Dhingra has saved friends from police in the past.
Trauma-bonding apart, Tejpal and Dhingra have been around in the Mumbai movie-industry crew for a while. In fact, they once worked on the same film, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Dilli 6 (2009), although separately.
Speaking of Mehra, if you go back to Rang De Basanti (RDB, 2006), you’ll discover both the male leads of this movie, Vardhan and Banerjee, in the same ‘audition scene’, in a two-bit role.
It’s probably the first time Banerjee was before a film camera. He’s a legit star-actor now (Hathoda Tyagi from Paatal Lok; Jana from Stree series, etc).
Dhingra was line producer on RDB, though he never met these actors then. Now, he’s an independent producer (Angry Indian Goddesses, Beyond the Known World).
Life = movies = strange coincidences; off and onscreen, no?
It’s when they were making ad films together that Tejpal showed Dhingra, the infamous mob-lynching videos from Karbi Anglong, Assam, in 2018.
Dhingra says he was then simultaneously working on a series to do with missing children. Seemingly, the two strands stitched together to sculpt Stolen.
The core idea of which, much like the Karbi Anglong incident, spotlights the spectre of fake-news forwards, and Facebook/WhatsApp videos, where the mob is the multi-headed monster, and social-media the uncontrollable catalyst. As with Sudhir Mishra’s Afwaah (2023), also set over a night.
At the centre of it is a baby, getting inhumanely passed around, like in Devashish Makhija’s Joram (2023) that I found to be mildly far-fetched, but for Manoj Bajpayee in it and, of course, that crackling
train-action sequence.
In the periphery of the dark, racy, raw thriller, Stolen, is that obvious question of two Indias, where one simply can’t recognise the other, as we dig/travel deeper — not too far from Navdeep Singh’s NH 10 (2010) that was produced, among others, by Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane.
Both of whom, along with filmmakers Nikkhil Advani, Kiran Rao have selflessly lent their names, onboarding as executive producers of Stolen, shortly before the film dropped online. Surely, that counts for much.
Yet, no greater recco than Stolen having premiered at the top, Venice Film Festival, in August, 2023 — selected for the competitive Orizzonti Extra section, which is the equivalent of Cannes’s Un Certain Regard; really rare for a desi pic.
Tejpal tells me, “Unfortunately, that is of no consideration for [film] execs in India; if anything, it’s a negative.”
To which Dhingra adds, “Festival becomes a label: indie, hence, art-house, therefore boring. We made a commercial film. Entertaining, because it’s engaging!”
Either way, I notice Stolen trending globally, from India, on Prime Video; equally gravitating film-buffs and filmmakers around it, locally. Can totally see why!
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture.
He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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