Directed by Chinmay D Mandlekar, Governor stars Bajpayee as former RBI governor S Venkitaramanan, whose tenure overlapped with an economic crisis in the ‘90s. Venkitaramanan inherited an economy bent out of shape by the US-Iraq war. Entirely by accident, the movie finds itself playing against a similar geopolitical backdrop (this time the US-Iran war). But now, there’s no Congress to blame, as the film does for the past crisis.
You could bet your fast-falling rupees that the unit behind the film, Governor — produced by the same Vipul Amrutlal Shah who served up the deeply irresponsible The Kerala Story — had no idea that the universe would conspire to undermine whatever claims they’re trying to make here. The irony may be lost on the film’s team, of course, given a grasp of storytelling looser than the morals of mainstream Bollywood.
Starring Manoj Bajpayee as an approximation of the former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor S Venkitaramanan, whose tenure overlapped with an economic crisis in the ‘90s that brought India to the brink of bankruptcy, the film is gratingly loud, ridiculously plotted and delivered with an amateurishness bordering on arrogance.
Early signs of wreck
It begins, like most train wrecks could, with a close-up of Adah Sharma in old-age makeup. She’s lecturing her “privileged” nephew about how close India came to collapse in the early 1990s. “But we are the fourth-largest economy in the world,” he scoffs, only for his aunt to drag both him and the viewer into a feature-length flashback. She used to be a spunky journalist back in the day, all sly scoops and ‘sanksari’ salaciousness, when her path crossed with that of Bayjapyee's Venkitaramanan (henceforth Ramanan for short). He was seemingly picked from obscurity to shepherd India out of an economic mess that the film doesn’t miss an opportunity to blame on the Congress.
It takes roughly 20 minutes for Governor, directed by Chinmay D. Mandlekar, to throw Jawaharlal Nehru under the bus. Rajiv Gandhi joins him there five minutes later. It was at Gandhi’s behest that Ramanan was appointed RBI governor, the movie grudgingly admits, only to suggest that the late Prime Minister was scheming to make him a scapegoat in the event of absolute economic collapse. But the mildly eccentric Ramanan, whose grand introduction in the movie coincides with a public self-immolation, walks into the RBI offices, as one of his aides says, having “done his homework”.
He puts a plan in place, illustrated by a diagram of childlike simplicity that Mandlekar keeps cutting to whenever he senses that he’s losing the audience. But that would require a script that’s actually dense with ideas and integrity and not one in which the protagonist’s brightest ideas are born entirely out of coincidences. Mandlekar can rest easy; it’s more likely for a viewer to be dulled into submission by the film’s wall-to-wall score than for them to be outsmarted by the storytelling. Governor is, after all, a movie in which the man tasked with India’s economic future discovers concepts such as collateral on the job.
There could have been room for drama had the movie focused on the bureaucracy behind international borrowing and lending, but it doesn’t. You do, however, get the sense that it would have devoted more time to the red tape that Ramanan had to cut through had Gandhi been in power instead of Chandra Shekhar. Instead, Governor unfolds largely inside the RBI headquarters, where the employees seem to exist in an episode of the yesteryear series Office Office. How could you expect a film to axe Sharma’s entire subplot for brevity’s sake when it devotes scene after scene to one of Ramanan’s colleagues contemplating getting a Green Card, or another waging an unnecessary war against him?
Often, these characters gather in front of the childlike diagram depicting India’s failing economy and discuss grave matters like emergency reforms and bilateral ties with the energy of a Manchester United fan debating tactics ahead of a derby game. The entire movie has the aesthetic sensibility of one of those public awareness advertisement that they play before the starting of movies — unmotivated cutaways, jarring close-ups, random shifts in perspective. The peak detailing of Vipul Amrutlal Shah entails contemporary skylines, fresh drip and rain whose only connection to water is server-farm fuel.
The irony of accountability
And then, when all else fails, Governor hurls the audience headfirst into not one but two montages, set against songs composed by Amit Trivedi (questionable) and written by Javed Akhtar (scandalous).
The lyrics of one song go something like this: “India used to be a sone ki chiriya (golden bird). Ask yourself who ruined it. Achche din (good days) are coming. Never again will we face such humiliation.” I paraphrase, but only slightly. The song is a call to action, directed at the viewer.
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The movie wants us to want accountability. Oh, the irony. Ramanan inherited an economy bent out of shape by the Iraq War orchestrated by former US president George HW Bush; oil prices were skyrocketing, the rupee was plummeting. Entirely by accident, the movie finds itself playing to nearly empty theatres against a similar geopolitical backdrop (this time triggered by the US-Iran war). But now, there’s no Congress to blame, is there?
Bajpayee remains a national treasure — few actors can slip so comfortably between roles that require evocative silences or rely on broad comedy. However, left unattended, he has the tendency to go ham. For every Aligarh in his filmography, there is a Mrs Serial Killer. In Governor, he plays Ramanan with the mannered emptiness of a Chinese robot that some professor at a convention will pass off as homegrown. In a way, this is exactly what Bollywood has come to. At a time when literal teenagers are challenging archaic conventions, Governor exists to uphold them.
