Newton: Engaging, stunninng election time tale

Cast: Rajkummar Rao, Pankaj Tripathi, Anjali Patil, Raghubir Yadav

Rated: 9.5/10

Perfection is a misnomer, an impossible achievement in cinema. But young director Amit V Masurkar makes it routine in his statement-making film Newton. Nutan turns to Newton much like reality turns to drama and drama turns to comedy in this delightfully nonchalant film on election-day in a Naxalite-infested jungle with just 76 voters.

On the face of it, films restricted to a monotonous canvas, unfolding in a small room or space and playing out on minimalistic emotions about purportedly insignificant issues are genetically claustrophobic and inertia-ridden. Newton is all this and yet refreshingly breezy and comically insulated from even a whisk of boredom. Masurkar’s perfection also peeps through the simple chores he introduces to the film in showing the most complex and detailed process of holding elections in the tumultuous democracy that is India. He brings to the ballot boxes voters who may not even know an entity called ‘India’ but still have a vote in them that counts. You may laugh through the 9 am to 4 pm proceedings despite many faultlines of polity and reality at play. Masurkar makes you realise, introspect and understand that the India we inhabit is a mind-boggling phenomenon powered as much by the rustic ignorance of its population as by the tumultuous mechanics that govern it, exploit it and need it.

It could well have been just a documentary on the Election Commission of India’s poll holding dynamics but Newton is about much more — the rigours of honesty in a corruption-ridden, scepticism-brewing society, the anti-establishment segments, the travails of the paramilitary forces in an infested area, the marginalised tribals, the harsh realities of intra-wars in a nation and the entire machinery being employed to hold “free and fair” elections on a canvas left alone, isolated and uncared for.

Masurkar manages to showcase all this and much more only because of the stellar performances of its star cast led by a curly-haired, poker-faced cog in the giant wheel of a democracy that is entirely bewildering and yet so colourful. You could call Newton the undying strain of reason in total chaos. His honesty to hold a “free and fair” election for 76 tribals in the deep of an insurgency-infested jungle, that too with electronic voting machines that none of the voters know how to use, or even why to use, injects that impossible life fluid of hope that inexplicably lubricates the Indian democracy at large. Flying high at the moment with his very own brand of bewitching realism, Rajkummar Rao is going to the Oscars this season, and rightly so. So is Pankaj Tripathi who plays an entirely hilarious senior commandant tasked to escort Newton and his election officers to the heart of a jungle where no man dares to tread. The exchanges between a callow Newton and a war-weary Tripathi are life cells of this engaging movie. Raghuvir Yadav totally merges into an around-retirement all-knowing babu who has seen life from the prism of administration.

Sanjay Mishra’s cameo inaugurates the tone of the film with his seasoned phalsafa on honesty being a duty and not something to sport as a decorative pin on your collar. Many such learning lessons come down the forest as you settle down to enjoy the meaning of the nation you live in.

This election at the Oscars, Newton should — and must — get a landslide victory. But before that, do go and vote for it in a cinema near you.

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 24 September, 2017