Anthony, Akbar & Amar: My quick take on Vidya Balan’s “Sherni”
If Sherni is used as a metaphor to depict Vidya Balan’s character, then I should say it is brilliantly used. Because Vidya Balan has got into the skin of this character of Vidya Vincent, DFO and like a lioness, she is shown as a courageous, imaginative & intelligent forest officer. But if it is used to depict the storyline, then it is grossly misplaced as the word Sherni means a lioness while the movie is all about a tigress.
Director Amit Masurkar is back in the jungles after his Newton and this time too his main protagonist is like Newton, a vincent (Vidya Vincent). Not sure is it by design or by chance that the main characters are like MKDs Amar Akbar Anthony with Vidya Vincent being the Anthony, the upright no-nonsense forest officer, Noorani is the Akbar played by talented Vijay Raaz plays a Zoology professor & a corrupt uncouth Bansal is the Amar played by Bijendra Kala is the senior of Vidya Balan in forest department.
The plot is all about the Animal-Human conflict and how we the humans are encroaching the territories of these animals in the name of development and progress. The plot is set in a remote village in Madhya Pradesh’s Forest area where a village is troubled by a tigress (it is not clear if the Tigress has become a man-eater or is it simply attacking the villagers). Forest officer Vidya and her team want to track the tigress, tranquilize it and then transport it to the neighboring national park, while the local politicians are using this as an opportunity to score brownie points over each other as they want to win the forthcoming election. A trophy hunter in the garb of a conservationist is hired to get rid of the tiger and its cubs.
What I loved about the movie was its cast, Vidya Balan, Vijay Raaz, Bijendra Kala & Sharath Saxena are simply brilliant in their respective roles. Secondly, the on-location shooting of MP jungles gives the movie a certain kind of credibility, the camera work and lush green fauna of MP jungles are captured very well. Thirdly movie also educates us about the working of a typical forest department. Director Amit Masurkar has also shown sparks of brilliance in overall production design, there is one shot where Bijendra Kala is running to hide from an angry crowd and he hides in a typical ‘record room’ filled with files – it was a nice way to show a forest officer caught in his own ‘jungle’ of files – brilliant !!, the director also resisted the temptation of making the lead heroine sing and dance in the jungle else Sherni would have become a morni.
What I did not like about the movie was the too much weightage given to subplots of local politics which in my view was redundant, secondly, the jungle reminded me of Devar films which used to have just one tiger, one elephant, and one monkey, similarly this jungle was sans wild animals and the tiger shown was CGI’d hence not at all impressive, thirdly the climax, it was so badly done and is very incomprehensible, how can the protagonist who is shown as a Sherni meekly falls in line with our ‘corrupt system’.
However, the movie is made watchable by Vidya Balan and Brijendra Kala. Movie is available on Amazon Prime.
On the light note, after Newton and Vincent the protagonist of Atul Masurkar in next film will be Leonardo.
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