The strange case of Deepak Dobriyal and an unsavoury samosa

Why does Deepak Dobriyal not have a higher profile? Having been a fan ever since I saw his dialogue-less performance as a Mumbai commuter in the Kundan Shah short “Hero”, I often wonder what keeps this skilled actor – who was so impressive in small parts in films like Omkara, Delhi-6, Gulaal and Tanu Weds Manu – from doing more fleshed-out parts in good movies. Especially at a time when it is possible to be a leading man in Hindi cinema without fitting the image of the tall, strapping, urbane hero; when strong roles are being written both for the sweet boy-next-door types and the sort of performer who would have been viewed as too rustic a decade ago; and when a gamut of actors ranging from Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Raj Kumar Yadav to Ranvir Sheorey and Ayushmann Khurana are finding success in specific niches.

Speaking of Nawazuddin, pleasing and well-deserved though his stardom is, it has had an annoying by-product: the consolidation of the tritely inspirational narrative “If you have the talent and do the hard work, you WILL make it.” As if one Siddiqui has transformed the film industry into a paradise of meritocracy. As if there still aren’t thousands of strugglers who, with all the talent and drive in the world, won’t get anywhere near where they hope to be.

Dobriyal doesn’t fall in that group of strugglers, of course: he is far from anonymous, is respected among those who know their cinema well, has worked with people like Vishal Bhardwaj, Anurag Kashyap and Ram Gopal Varma (I haven’t seen Not a Love Story yet, but I’ve heard he was good in it) and has plenty of time to build his résumé. But it was depressing to see him in the recent Chor Chor Super Chor, a film that began on a promising note and degenerated so completely, I thought I had tripped into the wrong hall after the interval.

He plays Satbir, a small-time crook making an effort to go straight while also heading for a tentative romance with an "innocent-jaisi" girl named Neena (Priya Bathija), who may have hidden depths. (“Bhoot savaar ho gaya hai pyaar aur imaandaari ka” says one of his former associates disapprovingly.) Satbir is one of the lower-class aspirers that recent Hindi cinema has given us so many of, a less cocky version of Lucky in Oye Lucky! Lucky! Oye, a bit out of his depth at times but enterprising enough to be able to impress a potential boss during an interview by grabbing the phone and fixing a meeting with a client. Dobriyal is very engaging in the role, but it becomes painful to see his earnestness at the service of an increasingly unworthy script - to see him trying to explore the possibilities of his character when the film itself has little interest in character development, tonal evenness or credibility.

Not that Chor Chor Super Chor begins that way. There are interesting things in the first 40-45 minutes, starting with the avuncular, unremarkable-looking Shukla-ji who runs a small photo studio as a front for a group of young offenders. Shukla, I kept thinking, might be the older, corrupted version of Vinod or Sudhir from Jaane bhi do Yaaro, teaching his wards how to be “kaamyaab” in a world built on hierarchies of crookedness rather than on idealism. And in these early scenes, the film emphasizes the contrast between the posturing of the youngsters and their unglamorous background. (One nice shot has Satbir preening in front of a mirror, but the setting is a public toilet and while he occupies the left half of the screen, the right half is filled by three urinals. It has the effect of turning him into a comic figure rather than the hero he is trying to be.) There are sweet little touches too: the opening credits play out in the old-world animation style of The Pink Panther (the “sound design” credit is accompanied by text that says “Add to torrents” – perhaps a reminder of illegal downloads, and of how many different types of “chori” there are in a world where Satbir and gang are small fry) and a cutesy but effective sight gag involves a giant samosa costume used as promotion for a mall kiosk.

But what begins as a quietly humorous story with a sense of place and sub-culture, and a basic affection for its people, retains none of these qualities. The second half, which involves an attempt by Satbir and his friends to play a counter-con on a TV news channel, is spectacularly poor. The lazy caricaturing, the leaps in logic and plausibility, were more pronounced than any I have seen on screen recently. (If you were a TV producer with a tape of a huge story that will make your channel famous in a few days, would you fail to recognize the protagonist of that story when you encountered him on the street?) And as my friend Uday points out here, one scene where a girl is cornered and harassed (or as the filmmakers might have it, “teased”) on a bus should have been very easy to rethink and quickly discard.

Through all this, Dobriyal’s integrity doesn’t waver. His performance, constructed from the inside out, convinced me that Satbir was a worldly-wise creature of his milieu (and probably a very efficient pickpocket in the past) but also that his efforts to pull himself into a more "respectable" world were sincere. If it were possible to view a film in such a way that you could fix your attention on just one figure on the screen, Chor Chor Super Chor may have been worth watching. I hope it represents only a minor blip in decision-making for its lead actor, rather than a sign of things to come.