Everyone wants a happy ending

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Ludo tries hard to present the world as breezily anarchic, but it's hard to sustain while going on about good and evil

Anurag Basu likes to cultivate the idea of chaos, creating a tangle of threads so he can have the aesthetic pleasure of disentangling them. His latest film Ludo, which launched on a streaming platform earlier this year, takes that aesthetic conceit to its acme. A film with four different tracks needs a structuring motif, and Basu's choice is the popular board game with a board and counters organised into four primary colours. At first it seems that the only uniting factor among these disparate narratives is an unkillable don called Sattu Bhaiyya (Pankaj Tripathi), from whose gun -- and whose den -- all stories flow.

But while the four tracks appear to be treading their individual way to anarchy, Basu has clearly spent some time imbuing them with a fundamental premise. At the centre of each is a pair of individuals who seem like they ought to come together neatly: fill each other's blank spaces, so to speak. But they're also unlucky pairings, disunited by fate and selfhood. There's a bullied nurse and a bullied mall attendant; a neglected little girl and an ex-goonda separated from his own child; a besotted dhaba owner and his unrequited childhood love, reeling from her discovery of a cheating husband; and a pretty girl obsessed with hunting down the perfect husband, unlike the laidback guy she has fun sex with. There is also Sattu Bhaiya himself-- he who cannot be killed -- and the senior Malayali nurse Lata Kutty, to whom he takes an unexpected shine.

All of Basu's characters need rescuing -- but in each pair, there's one that we're told needs rescuing more. Abhishek Bachchan's Bittu, for example, is a sad man who wants his daughter back, and transfers some of his affections to the lost little girl he stumbles on one evening. The child (Inayat Verma) is named Mini, in Basu's clear tribute to the classic Kabuliwala narrative about another tall burly man who's actually a softie missing his faraway daughter. You'd think the child would be the more vulnerable one, but of course it's she who delivers the life lesson: if the object of your affections is happy elsewhere, you've just got to be happy for them. Bittu refuses to listen when his ex-wife delivers it as a stinging remark on confusing love and ego, but he absorbs it perfectly out of the mouth of a child.

Thankfully the little girl isn't implied to be exploiting Bittu – which does feel like the case with some of the film's other women characters. Aditya Roy Kapur's Akash seeks (and finds) casual sex on a matrimonial website. But it's his sexual partner Shruti (Sanya Malhotra) that we're told needs to be saved from her dream of finding a rich provider. Meanwhile Fatima Sana Sheikh's Pinky exploits Rajkummar Rao's unyielding affections all the way through school into adulthood, and even beyond – even her marriage to an ostensibly more suitable boy cannot prevent Alloo (Rajkummar) from being the only man she can turn to in a crisis.

Crisis, though, is what makes the film's boardgame-level philosophising work to the extent it does. “Jo bin matlab de saath, usi ka pakad le haath (When someone helps you without a motive, that's the one to hang on to),” Shruti quotes her grandmother as having proclaimed. The bullied twosome have no language in common – Pearl Maane's Sheeja can't speak much Hindi, Rohit Saraf's Rahul Awasthi certainly understands no Malayalam. As they find themselves launched on an adventure not quite of their making, the thrill of the ride is all they have in common. But when you see them at film's end, having exchanged their sad working lives for a hot pink car and fancy clothes, you wonder how long the spark can survive through such comfort. As Akash tells Shruti, in another of the tracks, having too little can make happiness hard – but having too much makes it impossible.

But for all Basu's attempts at Seventh-Seal-type commentary in the guise of Yamraj (the Hindu god of death), Ludo can't have only neat conclusions. As Yamraj says, “If the Kauravas were villains, what was Duryodhana doing in heaven at the end?” So Ludo leaves us with at least one un-deserved sad ending.

But the randomness he claims isn't really sustained – most characters get their just desserts, including Sattu Bhaiyya's deserved ludic one: paralysis followed by life with a loving caretaker, a vision of a lifelong future we've seen in previous Indian films, most visibly Hazaaron Khwaishen Aisi. Anarchy isn't as easy as they make it out to be.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 Dec 2020.