For justice to be served, the law has to sometimes be ignored, the Inspector General of Police in Tamil Nadu tells a human rights lawyer in...
For justice to be served, the law has to sometimes be ignored, the Inspector General of Police in Tamil Nadu tells a human rights lawyer in Jai Bhim. The police officer narrates an anecdote about how, rather than following the rulebook to prevent the harassment of a schoolgirl, he crushed the perpetrator’s fingers instead.
In this film, Suriya plays the lawyer. But in another era, he may have been the policeman springing to the defence of the defenceless by breaking the law he is sworn to protect. As the fans know, the anecdote is a direct reference to the police drama Kaakha Kaakha, one of Suriya’s biggest hits.
The police officers whom Suriya’s advocate Chandru seeks to prosecute in Jai Bhim are the realistic iterations of the vigilante supercops whom the movies adore. Suriya played one of them in the Singam films, which were remade in Hindi.
Tha Se Gnanavel’s Jai Bhim, which has been released on Amazon Prime Video, is based on an actual incident that took place in Cuddalore in 1993. The movie joins such recent Tamil productions as Vetri Maaran’s Visaranai and Mari Selvaraj’s Karnan in spotlighting the extreme vulnerability of marginalised groups to police harassment, wrongful incarceration and worse.
The solidly performed and frequently disturbing movie is set among the Irula tribe in Villupuram. Dirt-poor...
