Director: Ramin Bahrani
Cast: Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Adarsh Gourav, Rajkummar Rao
Language: English/ Hindi
Adarsh Gourav as Balram owns The White Tiger. As a faithful servant to an extremely rich master Ashok (Rajkummar Rao), Gourav shows us shades of a range of emotions and we end up understanding Balram and his extreme actions as the movie winds up. And that is how Iranian American director Ramin Bahrani takes us through this extremely thrilling ride that covers caste, class, murder, greed and what not. The White Tiger is based on the award-winning novel by famous novelist Aravind Adiga. In fact, Adiga had dedicated his Booker-winning novel to Bahrani.
The White Tiger is all about a lowly servant’s dreams of rise to power. The cunning and brilliant Balram was told to believe he was as rare as the white tiger is in India. Born in a poor family with no means, Balram shows aptitude and knowledge from a young age. But his monetary status forces him to pursue menial jobs till he lands a job of being a driver to a rich man’s son Ashok. Soon the two lives intervene and Balram who seeks nothing, but his master’s approval soon finds the whole façade pointless. He finds nefarious ways to get on top and crosses many lines in doing so. The White Tiger is the ruthless story of a poor young man rising to the top without giving a second thought to those around him, including his family.
As I said before, Adarsh Gourav owns the film. Be it as a docile servant who imagines himself as replacing his master’s wife after her departure or as someone who is out to get his master, Gourav masters them all. He is particularly fantastic in scenes where he plays an uninvited audience when Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) and Ashok are intimate together. There are so many moments of understated anger gleaming from Gourav’s eyes that we soon start to understand (if not fathom) why he does what he does. Rajkummar Rao is good as the USA-returnee who has a ruthless businessman as his father. Some of his best scenes are with Balram where the two of them form this strange yet understandable bond. Ashok believes that the world should be equal, but does not understand that his very existence opposes it. Priyanka Chopra Jonas is the Indian American wife whose deadly act changes her relationship with her husband. She too believes in humane treatment of servants, but the hypocrisy is startling and forms the crux of the inequality that plagues our societytoday.
The screenplay is particularly hard-hitting. “Do we loathe our masters behind a façade of love or do we love them behind a façade of loathing.” Here is another gem – “If only a man could spit out his past so easily.” The cinematography is captivating, and we see the jungle that is life in different settings. But what irked me throughout the film was the language. English is predominantly spoken in the film and though the universality is maintained because of it, I felt that it took away a good measure of authenticity from a story that depended on inequality of class and caste.
The White Tiger is a story that is relevant in India even today. Not much has changed since the novel made headlines years back. And hence when we see someone like Balram on the big screen doing the things he does to rise up and ‘break free from the rooster coop’, we have confirmation that nothing much has changed.
Rating: 3/5
