Newton", directed by Amit Masurkar, RT a fast moving 106 minutes. Viewed at the Kerala film festival in extreme southern India in December 2017.
Newton is an off Bollywood Hindi film devoid of songs and dances and stars rapidly rising tinseltown thespian Rajkumar Rao. It was one of the big Indian films of 2017 and was nominated as India's entry to this years Oscars but failed make the final short list to general Indian disappointment.
Rao plays a gung-ho government clerk on election duty in the conflict ridden jungle of Central India trying his best to conduct free and fair voting in a remote village of ignorant tribal people who do not really understand what elections are all about. An interpreter is required to communicate with them as their tribal language is totally unrelated to other Indian languages and none of them speak Hindi. Complicating matters is the apathy of the security forces and the looming fear of guerrilla attacks by Naxalite communist rebels. A bit of romantic relief is supplied by a tentative romance between Newton and the fetching female interpreter. (Anjali Patil).
This sincere effort addresses two nagging Indian problems; how to avoid fixing of elections, and educate simple tribal people to the meaningfulnes of the voting process in "the world's largest democracy". Also, dealing militarily with the long term Communist inspired guerilla insurrections in this remote region. We learn at the very beginning that our heroe's name which is actually Nutan has been modified by him to conform to that of the famous English Physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton.
Hey, this guy is an intellectual, right? --and he is not interested in his father's outmoded attempts to get him properly married off in an arranged marriage. So being a young educated idealist he volunteers for a seemingly hopeless election mission in the threatened back woods and the rest of the story is about the various problems and threats encountered there and his relationship with a no nonsense military man (Pankaj Tripathi) assigned to protect the election hut set up from possible Naxalite attack. Pankaj takes an extremely dim view of Newton's naive idealism leading to some risible moments. Rao delivers a touching performance as the bewildered but determined and sincere young man among wolves but the film, while it maintains interest largely on Rao's engaging performance, is overly didactic and message laden. Sam Goldwyn would have called in Western Union.
Nevertheless, this is a worthy and entertaining piece of work that got better with a second viewing some weeks later at a different festival.
