After a pretty riveting trilogy, it’s pretty clear that it’s almost impossible to outsmart the great cinephile Vijay Salgaonkar, played by Ajay Devgn. The police were unable to do this; neither the legal system nor the state. From each one emerges Vijay film intact, so much so that it is almost heroic.
Drishyam: The conclusionReleased more than a decade after the first film, it has lived up to the fame of the original. Even if the plot is only loosely connected in several places, it is still gripping and the characteristic plot twist at the end still feels sufficiently unpredictable. There is no doubt that this is a compelling thriller and I am not here to question the merits of its film adaptation.
Creating sympathy, controlling the rhetoric
What I care deeply about is Vijay Salgaonkar’s ability to evade prosecution almost every time. I will not question his true motive for participating in the crime which he actively committed, concealed or enabled; Maybe it was the right thing. More interesting, however, is his constant tendency to evade the law. How did he manage to do this again and again? One reason for this, of course, is that he thinks faster than the average person – and even a highly trained police trainer – and can seemingly see seven years into the future, consistently and comfortably outrunning the law. But this intellectual preparedness is almost in danger of being overshadowed by something else, which happens to be an infamous hallmark of our dominant political discourse. Whatever Vijay did, ethical or not, he managed to master a weapon more dangerous than all weapons: rhetoric.
Meera Deshmukh (Tabu) in a scene from the Drishyam series. Photo credit: Panorama Studios/Star Studio18
In all three films, Vijay manipulates rhetoric to his advantage. Despite the deadpan, robotic demeanor that Ajay Devgn displays in many of his contemporary roles, Vijay Salgaonkar’s character always maintains friendly relations with everyone around him. Unlike the quirky, movie-loving person-next-door he portrayed in the first film, these friendships didn’t happen in a vacuum. He had studied each individual closely enough to track and predict how each individual would react to a given situation. He had also silently assessed how useful each of them could be to him.
The first example of this can be seen in the first film when his neighbors come to his aid after he is publicly mistreated by the police. This crowd was of course consciously mobilized by him. Even the media was called upon to witness this visceral display of police brutality.
He uses the same tactic in Drishyam 2, this time shaping the narrative by producing a supposedly fictional book that documents the police’s deliberate and fabricated actions against him. How could there be such uncanny similarities to an ongoing murder case? This was enough to secure Vijay’s acquittal. The book served the same purpose as mobilizing his neighbors: it shaped the narrative to get people to empathize with Vijay.
A clueless political allegory
However, the latest film in the series, Drishyam: The Conclusion, takes this to the extreme and, perhaps unintentionally, almost becomes an allegory for the country’s current political situation. The film brings religion, the opiate of the masses, into play.
By befriending members of the church community, Vijay makes himself virtually untouchable. When you are shielded from the fury of a religious group, there is little that can harm you, especially with an extremely careful plan like the one devised by Vijay. As is obvious given the current situation, once you prey on the feelings of a particularly sensitive and gullible group, it may be difficult even for the law to hold you accountable.
Vijay Salgaonkar (Ajay Devgn) in a scene from the Drishyam series. Photo credit: Panorama Studios/Star Studio18
This further reinforces the idea that with a little money and a well-crafted public persona one can gain loyalty, which could prove to be a saving grace. Add faith to the mix and you may just have the basic building blocks of the current ruling party.
I may be reading too much into this, but Vijay’s character has an uncanny parallel in our society: someone with a natural penchant for inventing and shaping rhetoric for personal gain. Vijay may not be the most educated person of all, but there is no one, at least in his universe, who knows cinema better. He learns his craft from films, which is exactly why he understands the intricacies of building a narrative so well. We usually talk about a “media trial” as something in which a man is found guilty before a court can. But Vijay turns things on its head: here, public sympathy ensures a verdict of innocence long before the court verdict, so that the court has no choice but to play along.