REVIEW: Fakt Ladh Mhana

POPULIST AND PUERILE

Sanjay Jadhav's Fakt Ladh Mhana has Mahesh Manjrekar's stamp all over it. It's loud, unimaginative, and has a ragtag bunch of goons at its centre. Like most of Manjrekar's cinema, it also tries to tackle a contemporary socio-political issue without approaching it with any seriousness. In this case, the proposed SEZs in the Konkan region and the plight of farmers caught in the quagmire of land aquisitions by large corporations (there's an industrialist in the film who's ranked 7th of the Forbes international list, and no prizes for guessing who that's meant to be) facilitated by greedy politicians, forms the central conflict.

It's a theme worth tackling. Except Manjrekar (the writer) and Jadhav focus more on the bravado of the goons and gratuitous violence than on the plight of the farmers. While the trigger for the crisis is the killing of a war veteran (cliche, cliche) in order to grab his prime land, before long the scene shifts to a slum in Mahim which forms the adda of this gang (with Manjrekar as the boss) and it so happens that the solider-farmer's nephew (Bharat Jadhav) too is now a part of this outfit.

It's not inconceivable to imagine gangsters being a notch above dirty politicians in the hierarchy of depravation. In this case, minister Patil (Sachin Khedekar, dependable as always) and his brother function as warlords of the region and have everyone from the cops to loyal mediamen in their pockets. The soldier-farmer's semi-retarded son rushes to the city to ask for his cousin's help and so the gang arrives in the village to resolve the issue as only they can—by wrecking up the place in a senseless bloodbath. The politician, being even more vicious, uses all his might to try and annihilate them. No prizes for guessing who wins the contest.

Perhaps it isn't possible to win the battle of righteousness through the route of law. When all else fails, revolutionaries are born. But these guys aren't revolutionaries who effect any change at all. It's merely a case of personal vendetta and the end of one particularly evil man. Nowever does the film attempt to actually address the issue of corruption and the tragedy of common folk at the mercy of a system that consistently fails them.

And in that, it's just another exploitative B-movie.