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Thursday, 5 November 2015

LFF 2015 top 10 memories no.9: Guilty

Guilty (or Talvar in the film’s native tongue) is a curious hybrid of drama-documentary, police procedural and campaigning rally call. It focuses on a notorious double murder of a teenage girl and her middle class family’s servant in India in 2008 and what would appear to be one of the most shocking miscarriages of justice in any judicial system.

Clocking in at 132 minutes, the film gets through a lot of story without falling into the 60-second scene, followed by 60-second scene, followed by 60-second scene, etc, chain gang. As the film moves through its true twists and turns, the audience feels shock, horror and disgust at ever-escalating police incompetence: crime scenes contaminated, key evidence ignored or lost, important questions not asked, etc.

Some semblance of proper police work arrives in the form of the ever-impressive Irrfan Khan (star of The Warrior, Life of Pi, Slumdog Millionaire, and The Lunchbox) as a lead investigator from the Central Department of Investigation (CDI), called in to run the case properly: he asks the right questions and understands the importance of forensics.

And all too soon, he arrives at a completely different conclusion to the local police. But he’s no saint, he’ll bend the rules to get to the truth. With the case apparently solved, a change at the top of the CDI finds Khan out on his ear, and another investigator is handed the case… And then the film moves into its shattering third act.

There are awkward moments in the film, tonal shifts that don’t quite work, possibly caused by observations of Indian culture being lost in translation and because of the film’s mash-up of genres.

And there is no escaping that despite director Meghna Gulzar’s attempts to be as objective as possible, some characters are treated with greater sympathy than others, and certainly I felt the outcome was a clear miscarriage of justice.

But that statement needs some fleshing out: whether the parties found to be guilty are guilty is almost a moot point; the key point is the utter failure of the justice system to carry out its task as effectively and rigorously as possible.

If you have any interest in policiers, then you must see this.
Score: 7/10

No release date is confirmed yet.

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