The clock on the table shows it’s five minutes past ten in the night. He is just back from a gruelling day-long shift. Which includes a clandestine delivery of political pamphlets at a rally being monitored by the authorities. By all reckoning he is dead beat, riding the length and breadth of the city all day. At home, a tube light needs fixing. No sooner has he addressed it than a ping on his mobile phone informs him that his employer has just blocked his access to the company website. For all practical purposes he has lost his job. Again.
And yet, despite that burst of frustration which has him flinging the clock to the floor, there is little about him, his body language, that conveys his state of mind. His company tee is none the worse for the day’s wear. At 10.05pm. It looks as fresh as when he started out in the morning. There is not a trace of grime and sweat of a day out in the sun on his bearded face. Sure, the scene is meticulously crafted, but I never get a real sense of the character behind the actor.
For a film that prides itself on its authenticity, its real-life vibe, this is an unfortunate oversight. And symptomatic of what is lacking in Nandita Das’s take on the gig economy, particularly in the wake of the pandemic. On the surface, the director gets everything right. It is contemporary. It tackles a subject that a vast majority of us have lived through and lived with over the last few years, more acutely since the outbreak of Covid-19 (though the issues it addresses predate the pandemic). It makes all the right noises, and does so quietly and unobtrusively.
There are the slogans we have heard: Wo mazboor hai isiliye mazdoor hai. We get potent glimpses of the lack of dignity that informs work in this particular sector – a client he has just delivered a packet to addresses him as ‘Hey, Zwigato’. There are astute observations on where we stand as a nation, riven by caste, class and religious divides. A food delivery boy is unable to complete his order because the premise is a temple and the guy’s name is Aslam. Three men are refused listing for a job because they do not have the ‘right’ surname. A young man runs after the protagonist’s bike, his despairing face reflected in the rear-view mirror, asking if owning a cycle, instead of a bike, qualifies him for the job. There’s a political activist holding a roadside dharna, speaking about five families in India holding all the country’s wealth, and ridiculing the government’s call to entrepreneurship: Apna malik khud baniye. There’s even an appropriate ‘protest’ song at the end of the rally.
We have graduates and doctorates willing to work as cleaning assistants in malls, and a suave manager mouthing homilies on the dignity of labour, reminding the protagonist how lucky he is to have the job that allows him to choose his own work days and timings in a country with endemic unemployment, where a vacancy for the post of a peon has 93,000 applicants. We have a client refusing the services of a masseur because the latter is draped in a plain sari and is sweating from her long commute, and the well-heeled client cannot bear body odour. We get glimpses of notice boards that say ‘Delivery boys not allowed to use lifts’. And even a telling scene where the protagonist’s wife, herself at the receiving end of caste and class prejudices, is shown serving water to the garbage collector in a glass kept separate from the rest of the family utensils. All of us are equally casteist, you see!
But right through its runtime, I found myself strangely uninvested in the family, in what they go through. The despair never feels organic. The situations and characters are relevant, contemporary, the staging is elegant, well thought out, but they seldom engage you. They exist only because the film-makers will them to, they unfold as per the screenwriters’ volition, but they feel inert, seldom acquiring a life of their own. Shahana Goswami is wonderfully nuanced right through, and is the film’s highlight, but I couldn’t shrug off the feeling – say, for example, in the sequence where she is crossing a busy road or in that final sequence when she lets out a whoop of liberated delight – that this is a mannered performance. The same goes for Kapil Sharma. He is good – but most of the hosannas coming his way are, I dare say, because of his public persona as a stand-up comic. (It reminded me of the accolades Jeetendra received for Parichay and Kinara, primarily because these were so drastically different from his regular image.)
Is it possible to get everything just too right so that it loses vitality, that it feels staged? Everything about Zwigato is just right. The pacing too is spot on. But, barring that one sequence in a cybercafé where a crowd of job-hopefuls gather to search for the government’s new job scheme on the internet, it is a ‘right’ that is uninvolving, bland. Even the climactic sequence with its whimsicality would have worked better if what went before had been emotionally engaging. Lacking that, the sequence comes across as Kapil Sharma and Shahana Goswami trying to play down-and-out characters who still have the wherewithal to reach for life’s little moments.
From any other film-maker this would probably have been a good film. But Nandita Das has set rather high standards with Firaaq and Manto, and Zwigato never manages the resonance of those. As someone who lost his job during the pandemic, I know the palpable fear and panic that grips one – even in a middle-class family with basic amenities more or less taken care of. I missed that in the lives Nandita Das gives us. During those dark days I met a guy at the local pharmaceutical who had lost his daily-wage job. Standing in the queue for medicines, he pointed out a small ad on a lamp-post that said: ‘Get cash with credit card. Contact…’. I haven’t forgotten the look in his eyes, the tremor in his voice, as he asked me if one could really get cash by calling that number. I looked for that in the characters in Zwigato. In vain. Manas and Pratima never get that across. I could never shake off the feeling that they will get through – not because all of us do in our own way – but because the script wills them to. I looked for the devastating truth of Ken Loach’s 2019 film Sorry We Missed You. I am sorry to say, I missed that in Zwigato.
(Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri is a film and music buff, editor, publisher, film critic and writer. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the website.)