Language: Malayalam
The trailer of Salute indicates that Dulquer Salmaan here plays a policeman who is being surveilled and tailed by his colleagues. Salmaan is Aravind Karunakaran, a young officer first embroiled in a cat-and-mouse game with his own department, before getting sucked into the pursuit of an elusive, nameless, faceless criminal.
Salute largely unfolds as a police procedural, showcasing the tedium of police investigations far removed from the glamour associated with them in TV shows. It is also about the possibility for redemption when a member of a corrupted state machinery has not entirely lost his conscience. His situation is more complex and the screenplay thus more layered because the wrongdoers he is fighting include those he cares for deeply.
This new police drama – directed by Rosshan Andrrews, written by Bobby and Sanjay – does not adhere to the conventions of the Malayalam filmverse. It is neither loud nor flashy as commercial cop films from this industry often are. It is not preoccupied with the hero’s swag, which is particularly commendable because that hero is played by the producer. It is also not about dirty cops alone nor about a clean-as-a-whistle Robin Hood, but revolves around an individual who falls in the sizeable space in between.
So far so good, and for the most part, Salute remains engaging as Aravind first wrestles with his conscience, later the system he was once a part of, and finally a con man whose every mask when peeled off reveals yet another. Somewhere in the second half though, the narrative begins to stretch itself, mistaking length for ruminativeness and needless additional seconds for detail. This progressively diminishes the impact of the suspense and the new revelations at every turn.
Even when it slips though, Salute is never less than interesting.
The film offers enough meat about Aravind’s investigation to keep that part of the plot absorbing, and spends a fair amount of time developing a couple of the policemen played by Manoj K Jayan and Alencier Ley Lopez who are Aravind’s combatants. This, and the moral questions raised in Salute, keep the first half engrossing. In the portions where the action moves away from Aravind’s involvement with these men, it dips because it is too focused on Aravind, and as it happens, this is also where the narrative is needlessly expanded.
The women in Salute, like women in most men-centric commercial Indian cinema, are marginal and few. This is particularly disappointing because Rosshan Andrrews, Bobby and Sanjay have done better by their female characters – central and supporting – in the past. Case in point: How Old Are You? with which Manju Warrier made her return to acting after a long break.
For a film that is this polished overall, the awkward dubbing for Diana Penty’s character Dia and the under-par acting by a bit-part player in the role of Aravind’s superior’s wife, stick out like reddened thumbs. The saving grace of Dia’s presence in the script is the scene in which Aravind tells his conservative family that she is his “partner”.
One reason why Salute works even through its missteps is the atmosphere the director manages to build with the aid of Jakes Bejoy’s music and DoP Aslam K Purayil’s frames that smoothly shift from the personal to the panoramic and back when the need arises. The other is Salmaan himself who remains thoroughly invested in his character’s dilemmas from beginning to end. His expressive face conveys Aravind’s inner conflicts as he finds himself being drawn into appalling police practices, shocked at the heartlessness of a loved one and subsequently when he realises that his reparation will cause great damage to that person.
Manoj K Jayan and Alencier Ley Lopez, the only other actors in the film with substantial screen time, are just as effective in portraying evil with shades of grey.
Last year, director Manu Ashokan’s Kaanekkaane dealt with the extraordinary lapses of conscience that seemingly ordinary, decent people are capable of. Salute is about what happens when the conscience awakens and an individual decides to set things right. Like Aravind Karunakaran, the film too slips and falls, but it manages to pick itself up well enough to be worth watching.
Salute is streaming on SonyLIV.
Rating: ***
Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial
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