“Choked: Paisa Bolta Hai” is literally a metaphor about the power of money to put a gag on someone’s life. Money troubles choke the best of people from every walk of life. Bearing the brunt of monetary pressure in the film is a lower-middle class family from Mumbai. At the same time, the whole of India is choked by the 2106 Indian banknote demonetization. If only metaphors and symbolisms could make a movie interesting, Anurag Kashyap’s “Choked” would have taken home the cake.
“Choked” was a great opportunity to document an event that is guaranteed to make it into history books. Featuring a lower-middle class family, its lower-middle class neighborhood, and a lower-middle class society, the film could have used them to showcase the chaos created by the sudden demonetization. But overemphasis on establishing characters strangles life out of the film.
Sarita (Saiyami Kher) and Sushant Pillai (Roshan Mathew) live with their pre-teen son Sameer (Parthvir Shukla) in a crowded Mumbai neighborhood. Sarita is a teller at a government bank while Sushant, a former musician, has given up music and is currently unemployed after switching between multiple jobs and failed attempts at different careers. For a family of three, survival on the meager salary of a bank teller is difficult in expensive Mumbai. Making things worse, the couple does not share a healthy relationship, as a past incident keeps coming between them.
The family struggles to live respectably on Sarita’s income when, one day, by sheer luck, she comes across plastic-wrapped bundles of bank notes in the clogged drain of her kitchen sink. Apparently the tenant above her flat is laundering money for a politician. The event is repeated again and again, as the money keeps flowing. Sarita’s conscience is getting corrupted by the day as well.
Then, suddenly, everything and everyone is thrown into a frenzy when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announces that bank notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denominations would be invalid from the very next day. Sarita’s life is turned upside down as she starts being blackmailed by a goon, her husband starts doubting her, and work stress more than doubles for Sarita as people start piling in to have their notes exchanged.
To justify its name, panic and chaos should have been at the heart of Choked, but they are rare and thus the movie’s tempo is never raised. Director Kashyap spends much time establishing Sarita’s character. The pressure felt by the wife of an unemployed man who does not even help at home and is instead making things difficult for her is definitely strangling Sarita. Along with this, she also has to deal with bad memories from an incident that keeps gnawing on her mental health. But all this takes too much time to establish and by the time we see the bigger scheme of things, we start believing the film is about Sarita and everything else is sideshow.
This is probably one reason the film feels much longer than its 1hr 54mins runtime. And despite generous screen-time, the screenplay lags in the first half, and then whirlwinds into a climax. The film wastes too time creating symbolisms around Sarita. Many scenes with ominous music and quirky montages around Sarita never escalate into anything.
Kashyap delivers a film that is uncharacteristic of his passionate filmmaking. But the lead actors do benefit from time in front of camera. Roshan Matthew, who has already made is mark in Malayalam movies, now gets the attention of Bollywood. And Saiyami Kher, who suffered one of the biggest duds in 2016, starring in the fantasy “Mirzya” opposite Harshvardhan Kapoor, now benefits from all the added attention her character gets. Showing more maturity in her acting, Saiyami finally makes a mark in as an actor who could survive in the industry.
Ratings: 2.5 stars
Director: Anurag Kashyap
Actors: Saiyami Kher, Roshan Matthews
Genre: Drama
Run time: 1hr 54mins
