Sajid Ali’s assured debut film, currently streaming on Zee5, is about growing up, depicted through the lens of those who are yet to grow up
Sajid Ali’s Wo Bhi Din The, centering on a group of school students, is about the time when everyone is a protagonist in their head. The film, currently streaming on Zee5, encapsulates an age when one is convinced that they can be anyone they want to be and thus choose to be no one. It evokes a particular period in one’s life when heartbreak is validated only when scored to songs whose lyrics they cannot understand. Ali’s assured debut is about growing up, depicted through the lens of those who are yet to grow up.
In Hindi films, coming of age is an abused theme. Filmmakers use it not as much to depict the age but to treat it as a cautionary tale — reserving the tale for us and the caution for the protagonist. The rite of passage is designed as a roadmap with a lesson hanging at the destination. Egged on by adult gaze, outings in this pursuit tend to mimic the time and not inhabit it. Wo Bhi Din The course-corrects it by unfolding as a faithful representation of adolescence when everything feels too much, every prospect feels like a possibility and every concern feels damning.
The capriciousness of youth
When Rahul Sinha (Rohit Saraf), a high school student in Jamshedpur’s Loyola school — whose life the film tracks with attentive care — falls in love with his batchmate, he is convinced that they are meant to be. His best friend, Joy Ganguly (Adarsh Gourav), feels so, the arbitrary but undefeated FLAMES game indicates so, and there are plenty of signs to believe so. For one, she lives right across his building and, as Joy insists, it is meant to be. Again, when Rahul wakes up with an eye infection right on the day when his otherwise all-male classroom is supposed to accommodate female students, he is crushed beyond repair. His knee-jerk reaction is to not turn up at all for he is certain that life is ruined.
Much like Varun Grover’s endearing All India Rank, in which the languid pace aped the aimlessness of its teenager protagonist, Wo Bhi Din The unfolds informed with the intricacies of the age it is presenting. Everything is coloured by it; Ali imbues his characters with the vagaries, indecisiveness, cruelty and capriciousness of youth without tempering them with the wisdom of hindsight. Rahul, the boy in whom the teachers see more potential in than he does in himself, becomes the means.
He is named after characters essayed by a superstar who garnered huge popularity in the late 1990s — the time when Ali’s film is based on — and he behaves like he has seen men in films do. He hovers around the girl he loves, tries drinking water from the same tap she used. When he is heartbroken and sad, the instances are scored to funky English songs like they are playing in his head.
But to Ali’s merit, these perceived moments are disrupted with the fancy of age. Thus, although he believes in eternal love, Rahul quickly changes his feelings once he realises that another girl, Milky (Sanjana Sanghi) likes him. When in love, the world appears to be revolving around him. He lies to people, carelessly shrinks his best friend to a sidekick, and throws a tantrum on seeing Milky with another boy. He shames her for wearing a short skirt, talking to other boys, and threatens to leave.
In these moments, Rahul comes across as the origin story of the many hypermasculine men who are celebrated in Hindi films today but Ali treats it with perceptiveness, underlining lightly that his behaviour is a symptom of age and not signifier of an age. Rahul is a manchild because he can afford to be. He resides at the midpoint where he is grown up enough to not be deemed as a child and yet young enough to not be considered an adult.
The place they know, and one that knows them
But what really counts Ali’s merit as a storyteller the most is his skill of including the place with the people in his narrative, of knowing that how we grow up depends on where we grow up. Wo Bhi Din The unravels as an unembellished portrait of adolescence but during its run time, also doubles up as a charming portrait of Jamshedpur, a city which featured as the backdrop of Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan, another delightful terrific coming-of-age film. The outline of the place defines their experiences.
The high school students of Loyola possess a bashfulness that feels like bravado at close glance. They smoke in alleys and hesitate to talk to girls. When they are taken for an excursion to Puri, a famous coastal city in Orissa, their excitement is dialled up in the hope of seeing women by the beach.
They are in awe when Milky shares that she has come from Singapore, and when Rahul is cornered by his friends, his retaliation counts for the first spark of ambition. He plans to study abroad. Although he does not articulate it, the only way he seeks validating his worth to his kin is leaping into the big, bad world and abandoning the cushion of the city behind. Even the local goons (headlined by the terrific Zeishan Quadri) are men who are looking for more excuses to stay back. Their notoriety comprises eve-teasing women, leaking exam question papers, but can be distilled to desperate attempts to not leave the only place they know and the only place that knows them.
It is almost poetic that Ali’s debut work Wo Bhi Din The took 11 years to see the light of the day while his sophomore outing Laila Majnu (2018) sealed his reputation as a formidable talent. The narrative ties up with the subtext of his film which straddles timelines to assert that the difference between growing up and being a grown-up is reckoning with a crucial truth: what you think will change your life and what eventually does never really align. But that everything once felt like they could alter our being makes the time unforgettable. Wo Bhi Din The is about that age.
