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Behind bars!

All set Madhur Bhandarkar with the cast of ‘Jail’

When I went inside jails in Maharashtra, for research, I almost went into depression. For two days, I couldn’t come out of that state.” This is filmmaker Madhur Bhandarkar recalling the shooting days of his forthcoming Jail. At Macau, he has unveiled the first look of the film in the run-up to IIFA Awards being hosted there. The lead pair Neil Nitin Mukesh and Mugdha Godse accompanied him to Macau.

Madhur, with some coaxing, gives the storyline focussing on what it is not than what it is! He says, “The film is about a boy called Parag Dixit (Neil Nitin Mukesh) who works in a corporate office. He gets trapped in unfavourable circumstances and lands up in a jail. There he meets people from various places, some innocent, some guilty. In the process of his own struggle to get out of jail, he learns about their lives and pain, and how a jail administration works.”

Madhur has often been accused of making a docudrama of sorts in his penchant for exposing the truth. He refutes assertively, “Jail is not a documentary but a mirror to society. It talks about the difficult patches of life for undertrials. It has nothing to do with the pressures of law or a comment on the system. It is not a dark film.”

Like other films of Madhur (Chandni Bar, Page 3, Corporate and Fashion), Jail too is expected to reveal some harsh realities. This two-time National Award winner adds that Jail has doses of humour too. “Among several under-trials Parag meets, some are comical who will make you laugh with their tongue-in-cheek dialogues and at the same time convey that even in adverse circumstances one can smile,” he says. Madhur is learnt to have visited Tihar Jail several times but he didn’t get permission to shoot there. He agrees, “Yes, I visited Tihar Jail but didn’t shoot.”

Though there are rumours that the film is partly based on Sanjay Dutt’s jail days, Madhur denies it: “It has nothing to do with Sanjay Dutt or Sanjay Nanda, it is a fictional story based on a script.”

Madhur’s films now seem to suffer from a kind of sameness. The audience can gauge the beginning, the middle and the end.“And yet they never leave the hall because they want to know the reality,” he quips adding, “I take this remark positively because this is my signature style of filmmaking and Jail is no different.”

Model-turned actor Mugdha Mughdha Godse, who surprised the audiences with her natural performance in Bhandarkar’s Fashion, plays the love interest of Parag here. “I am an air hostess in the film,” she chips in.

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