The rot within: Manoj Bajpayee, Kanu Behl on ‘Despatch’

Manoj Bajpayee and Kanu Behl talk ‘Despatch’, a shadowy anti-thriller inspired by crimes past and present

In 2017, the journalist and activist Gauri Lankesh was gunned down outside her home in Bengaluru. Among those disturbed by the incident — and the larger trend of journalists and scholars dropping dead in modern India — was filmmaker Kanu Behl. Known for dark, masculinity-probing films like Titli and Agra, Behl wanted to break out of his shell and attempt something fresh. Along with screenwriter Ishani Banerjee, he threw himself into research, which lasted 18 months.

“We attended court sessions, spoke to crime journalists, lawyers, cops, even a couple of underworld sharpshooters,” Behl shares. Josy Joseph, a Delhi-based investigative journalist whose book, A Feast of Vultures, was widely acclaimed, was one of the resources. Everyone had the same refrain: a criminal-political-corporate nexus befogs and bedevils our unequal world, rendering truth-seeking virtually impossible. “A bigger story started emerging out of our smaller story.”

The resultant film, Despatch, began streaming on ZEE5 on December 13. Tense and tenebrous, it wears the garb of a straight-ahead thriller. Manoj Bajpayee is Joy Bag, a crime journalist probing a shootout and treading into forbidden waters. The character is closely and clearly modelled on Jyotirmoy Dey, the star Mumbai scribe who was shot down by bike-borne assailants in 2011. Behl says he never approached the story as a true-lifer, unlike, say, something like Hansal Mehta’s Scoop, which references the J-Dey murder as its central trigger.

“I saw this as a Faustian exploration of one man’s actions, “ says Behl, who holds Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View and All the President’s Men—masterworks of the paranoid press procedural—in high regard.

“Journalists, in real life, are fallible, fragile, greedy, and troubled. If our system is morphing into something we don’t like, are our people also morphing into the same?”

Likeability, indeed, is not one of Joy’s stronger suits. He is not a family man; his marriage to Shweta (Shahana Goswami) is falling apart, and he’s involved with two other women, both journalists played by Arrchita Agarwaal and Rii Sen. It is a grasping, libidinous performance by Bajpayee, closing out the year with another sex-fueled role after the one in Killer Soup. “Despatch is probably the maximum sex I’ve had on screen,” Bajpayee, 55, laughs, adding, “The three relationships have a unique dynamic, and it’s replicated in the love-making.”

Bajpayee had first met Behl at a party, and complimented him on his debut feature, Titli. This was standard; what surprised Behl was the follow-up call the morning after. “I was struck that he meant it, and genuinely wanted to collaborate,” Behl says. On set, Bajpayee was put through the wringer, doing 40-45 takes at times. The process, as he says, was taxing and exhausting, yet rewarding. “This is what keeps me alive,” Bajpayee says. “I cannot carry dead meat to the set. I can take everything but I cannot take boredom.”