Rao takes being ‘Trapped’ to the next level
DIRECTOR: Vikramaditya Motwane CAST: Rajkummar Rao CLASSIFICATION: TBA RUNNING TIME: 105 min RATING: ★★★★✩
WHAT would you do if you were trapped in a high rise for days without food, water or company? Eat a bird although you are vegetarian? Check. Drink your own urine to quench your thirst? Check. Talk to a rat for company’s sake? Check.
The incredibly gifted Rajkummar Rao, no stranger to internalised performances, immerses himself in the judiciously assembled plot with such radiant authenticity that after a while we cease to watch the skill that underlines his outstanding performance as Shourya. All we see is the suffering of the trapped soul, his desperation to get out of that apartment where he is locked away, far from civilisation – although he is not even a road away from the bustle.
Unlike other great survival dramas, such as Robert Zemeckis’ Castaway or Ang Lee’s The Life Of Pi (the latter exceedingly overpraised), Trapped is set in the heart of a swarming city filled with people who – not to put it too politely – don’t give a damn about the next person.
Director Vikramaditya Motwane, who last helmed the underwhelming Lootera, brings out the apathy in the large city in a sequence where Rao announces his departure to his flatmates. They barely muster a response and one of them indifferently asks where he is going. The answer is not relevant.
The preamble, which includes a sudden eruption of romance with a woman called Noorie (Geetanjali Thapa) ends just as suddenly, once Shourya gets trapped in the apartment, which is so far removed from human contact that no scream of help reaches anyone’s ears. It is a terrifying premise and is executed effectively by a script that relentlessly explores the theme of isolation and survival.
Cinematographer Siddharth Diwan is as fearless behind the camera as Rao is in front of it. Together, they shoot Shourya’s growing decline and fading hopes of rescue with minimalist magnificence. If Shourya bleeds, we can’t look away.
Rao’s projection of his character’s waning Rajkummar Rao plays Shourya, who cannot escape from his high-rise apartment in a heartless city in the survival drama, Trapped. strength is as authentic as Tom Hanks in Castaway, although Rao’s Shourya is no islanded recluse. The little apartment that is perched in the sky is all the world that Motwane’s plot inhabits. There are no frills and no digressions. The background score by Aloknanda Dasgupta is used with rationed effect, quite like the time, food, water and hope, which are all running out for the protagonist.
The one time that the background score lights up the soundscape is when Shourya collects rainwater in every vessel he can find in his high-rise prison. It is an interlude that reminds us that what we have and what we take for granted can be snatched away within moments.
Even the one flashback is severely restricted (when we see Shourya arguing passionately in favour of vegetarianism before being forced to eat a bird in the present crisis). What we get is the core element of survival, the very epicentre of self-preservation where no action or reaction is prohibited. It is very difficult for one actor to hold our attention for two hours, but Rao gets our undivided attention. His character’s awful predicament is so tangibly believable as to leave the audience feeling shaken.
Among the many remarkable hurdles that Motwane’s storytelling crosses with its beleaguered protagonist is the idea of getting the geographical periphery of the crisis right. The apartment building, the isolated flat and its distance from any human contact are all measured out by the storytellers, so that we never feel we are being tricked into believing in Shourya’s crisis.
At one point during the actor’s journey from self-assertion to self-abnegation, and beyond, we see Rao’s trousers fall from his waist and to the ground. It helps to serve two purposes – it shows the character’s complete repudiation of vanity in the face of death and how much weight the actor has lost in the course of his journey.
It’s hard to imagine Trapped working so effectively without Rajkummar Rao. He lives every second of Shourya’s struggle for selfpreservation. His journey is so illustrative of a migrant’s metropolitan melancholy as to make any attempt to add signboards to the storytelling akin to shining torchlight to supplement sunlight. – IANS