Salaam Venky movie review: Kajol, Vishal Jethwa deliver towering performances in this poignant medico-legal drama

Language: Hindi

Cast: Kajol, Vishal Jethwa, Rahul Bose, Rajeev Khandelwal and Ahana Kumra (with a cameo from Aamir Khan)

Director: Revathy

Euthanasia (or physician-assisted suicide) is a thorny issue for obvious reasons; emotional and legal cul-de-sacs abound, which makes it uniquely difficult to depict onscreen. The first time I saw a depiction was over a decade ago, in an episode of the legal dramedy Boston Legal, where Carl Reiner played a flamboyant lawyer asking to be put to ‘cryogenic sleep’ so that he may be resurrected at a future date, when the reversal of cellular decay is a scientific possibility. Despite Reiner’s assured performance, the episode didn’t work because tonally, the comedic bits felt wildly out of sync with the rest of the plot’s much more sombre dissection of medico-legal quagmires. I can think of the Spanish-language film Mar Adentro (starring Javier Bardem) and (to a lesser degree) the Sanjay Leela Bhansali-directed Bollywood film _Guzaarish_ among the few movies that have managed the task of talking about euthanasia in a clear-eyed yet empathetic manner, without being schmaltzy or overly analytical.

To this list we can now add _Salaam Venky_, the actor and filmmaker Revathy’s latest film, starring Kajol and Vishal Jethwa, with Rajeev Khandelwal, Rahul Bose and Ahana Kumra in supporting roles. The film is based on Shrikant Murthy’s nonfiction book The Last Hurrah, based on the life of Konnavelu Venkatesh (1979-2004), a young chess player who suffered the degenerative genetic disease DMD (Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy) and petitioned the courts for euthanasia. Jethwa plays Venky while Kajol plays his mother Sujatha.

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And it is this pair of lead performances that anchor this film ably throughout. Vishal Jethwa, who was downright menacing as the 20-something serial killer and rapist in _Mardaani 2_, disappears into the challenging role of Venky here. The youngster’s indomitable appetite for life is a thing of rare beauty and Jethwa brings a sense of wide-eyed wonder that’s ideal to depict this exceptional life. Venky wants euthanasia because he wants to donate his organs, he wants to save somebody’s life as a kind of parting legacy. Clearly, this was an exceptional young man and Jethwa’s performance feels worthy of the occasion. The camera sings and soars shooting Jethwa in the first-half song ‘Anda Bata Paratha’, while the bright-yellow palate of the song evokes the hope of spring’s first day. Later in the film, Venky’s facial muscles start breaking down and he can only communicate in sign language; this is by any standards a considerable acting challenge, especially for one so young. But Jethwa pulls it off with a dignity and a gravitas of a much older actor.

And where do we even begin with the powerhouse that is Kajol? The actor’s comeback to Bollywood has been a bit of a hit-and-miss affair, if we’re being perfectly honest, but this is by some distance her most impactful performance these last few years. Her wonderfully malleable voice conveys both strength and vulnerability in the same breath and those eyes remain as subtly compelling as ever. Sujatha’s courage and grace under fire, her sense of stubborn resolve as well as the obvious emotional upheavals she had to overcome within herself before she could fight the world—Kajol’s performance packs all of this in within the first 10-15 minutes we spend with her character. This is a true-blue Bollywood great as good as we’ve ever seen her, and this by itself is reason to get very, very excited about the future.

Revathy deserves a lot of credit for the way she sketches out Venky’s world—slowly at first and then in full throttle. All those years ago, with Mitr: My Friend, she told us a beautiful story about one woman’s quest to create an identity that was independent of her husband and daughter. Here, too, there is a secondary story arc about Sujatha’s divorce that forms a kind of dark companion piece to Mitr. We learn that Sujatha’s ex-husband withheld medical treatment for Venky because he saw the terminally ill boy as a ‘dead investment’ given the realities of his condition. And in an unspeakably cruel act, he asks Sujatha to divorce him in exchange for giving her full power-of-attorney re: Venky’s treatment. I say ‘unspeakably cruel’ but the truth is that an alarming number of women with terminal illnesses are, in fact, deserted and divorced by their husbands. Sociologically speaking, caregiving is deeply gendered; in India it is still seen as by and large a woman’s job.

Under Revathy’s expert steerage, Salaam Venky also tackles these ugly truths at the intersection of law, medicine and sociology (much like her earlier film, Phir Milenge did). That it does so without compromising on narrative momentum is doubly admirable. Watch this accomplished tear-jerker with friends and family, I’d say, and feel free to bawl your eyes out afterwards.

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

Salaam Venky is playing in theatres near you

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.

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