‘Daayra’: Meghna Gulzar, Prithviraj on why their new film isn't about police brutality

Dubai: There's a moment in my conversation with Meghna Gulzar and Prithviraj where the actor stops mid-thought and says something that could double as the thesis of their new film: "The closer it hits to home, the grey starts taking shades of black and white. But in general, if you were to be objective about the conversation, the entire conversation purely exists in grey."

That tension, between the comfort of moral certainty and the discomfort of moral complexity, is exactly the territory Gulzar and Prithviraj set out to occupy with Daayra, a police procedural that pointedly refuses to be called what audiences might expect.

It releases in the UAE cinemas tomorrow, September 18.

Not police brutality, just police procedure

Before we'd even settled into the interview, both stars pushed back on a word I'd used to describe the film: 'a cutting look at police brutality'.

"I actually would not join the word brutality after police," Gulzar said, "because I think that's a misconception as far as Daayra is concerned. It does talk about police action and police decisions and police reactions. Whether it's brutality or not is a question you will answer after you see the movie."

Prithviraj agreed, going further: "There is no police brutality in Daayra. There is a police procedural in the film, and there are decisions that a certain person called Raman Kumar, who happens to be a police officer leading an investigation, makes during the course of the procedural."

Those decisions, right or wrong, are deliberately left unresolved by the film itself.

"The film and the filmmaker merely plays the mediator for a debate," Prithviraj explained, "either side of which are represented by two characters, Raman and Ajuni, played by Kareena and myself."

The goal, he said, isn't to hand audiences an answer but to send them out of the theatre still arguing: "We hope that by the time the film finishes, you are also undecided, because now you want to ask yourself a lot of questions. You want to further the conversations the film has started."

A filmmaker who won't pick a side

Gulzar's built a career — Talvar, Chhapaak, Raazi — on stories drawn from real anguish, but says neutrality is an ethical obligation, not a style choice.

"Even the judiciary had opposing decisions on the same case," she said, recalling the real-life ambiguity behind Talvar. "So if the judiciary itself has no fixed point of view, how can a filmmaker? You can't take a stand. You present it objectively and leave it to the audience to decide."

Gulzar's Talvar follows the same murder investigation retold three times through the eyes of three different police teams, each landing on a different suspect and version of events, mirroring the real case's contradictions and leaving the audience to judge who actually did it.

Prithviraj, who has directed films himself, said watching Gulzar hold that line up close was instructive.

"It would have been very tempting for Meghna to veer towards one side of the argument; as a filmmaker, you can even do it implicitly, so subtly that someone watching might not even recognise it," he said.

"But I've watched the film, and I haven't seen a single moment where she's put out a message saying, this is where my heart is at. It's a very tough thing to do - to write something with two perspectives and be so equally far from both of them, and yet so close to each. That's what makes Daira really special."

When the grey turns black and white

I pushed both of them on something personal: as a mother of three including a 15-year-old daughter, and I told them my own instinct, when I hear of violence against a minor, is anything but grey. It's absolute. Capital punishment or castration for the predator.

Prithviraj didn't dodge it. "That's what Daayra speaks about — the black and white of justice, and the deliverance of justice, is unfortunately also a matter of perspective. If it happens to your own daughter, there is no grey there. There is only black or white. But if it's happening to somebody else, far away, and the perpetrator is, let's say, a 12-year-old boy — is it all black and white, or do we need to talk about this? Daayra exists in that grey."

Gulzar extended the thought to how the law itself needs to function. "We live in grey every day," she said.

"What is black and white for somebody else may be completely grey for you, depending on circumstance and perspective. Because we as people are dynamic, and society is dynamic, laws need to be interpreted dynamically."

Kareena, Prithviraj, and a deliberately "region-neutral" cast

The pairing of Kareena Kapoor and Prithviraj drew attention the moment it was announced, and Gulzar told me the unconventional casting was by design, not accident.

"The incidents and occurrences we depict in the film are not restricted to any one part of the country or one city or one part of the world," she said. "I really wanted the film to be region-neutral, geography-neutral, language-neutral. So I thought if I could get an actor from Hindi cinema and an actor who is not from Hindi cinema, it would really lend itself to being region-neutral. That's how the thought of Kareena and Prithviraj came to me."

Prithviraj, only half-joking, said he'd happily make it a pattern: "If I could come up with it, every Meghna Gulzar film would be starring me from now on."

On Hindi, and what actually made the role challenging

Given his Malayalam-cinema roots, I asked Prithviraj whether performing in Hindi was the film's biggest challenge. His answer was blunt: it wasn't close.

"I'm not playing Raman to prove my proficiency in Hindi, and I don't really care if people think my Hindi is bad, because Raman is about something much bigger than that," he said.

He noted Hindi is actually one of the few languages besides Malayalam and English that he can read and write fluently; unlike Telugu, which he dubs for himself despite not being able to read the script.

The real difficulty, he said, was emotional and interpretive: finding conviction in scenes built to represent an argument's opposing side, then walking up to Gulzar afterward for clarity.

"She'll have this really clear, crisp answer for why, and then you're like, okay."

Why make a film about someone else's worst day?

Given how much of Gulzar's filmography is drawn from real tragedy, I asked the question that inevitably follows: do filmmakers look at the most heinous crimes and see a good story?

Her answer was pointed. "That's not my first reaction when I read something unfortunate in the newspaper, because I think that's an extremely predatory reaction," she said. She pointed to Chhapaak as an example of how she chooses: despite many acid-attack cases to draw from, she picked Laxmi Agarwal's story specifically because of its legal legacy — "the first case which gave a 10-year sentence to the attacker, the first case which started talking about regularising the sale of acid in our country. You don't pick the crime for the heinousness of it. You pick a story because of how you think it will echo for your society."

Prithviraj framed it as a matter of craft rather than instinct: "Your craft, your medium is a newspaper — journalism. So you use your medium to try and start a conversation. Our craft is cinema. So we use our medium to try to start a conversation about something we feel strongly about. That is Daayra."

What they hope audiences walk away asking

Pressed on what they want viewers questioning once the credits roll, Prithviraj didn't hesitate: "Crime, quantum of punishment, justice, and very importantly, the system of deliverance of justice that exists in our country today."

Gulzar reached for a well-worn line, but meant it: "Art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. I think Daayra aspires to do that: to shake out of complacency what is comfortable, and try to soothe what is raw and disturbed with some kind of hope, some kind of solution."

Not judging the characters

One last question stuck with me: how do you write — or play — a character whose choices you might personally condemn, without judging them?

"As a parent, you can't judge your children," Gulzar said simply. "How will a filmmaker judge their characters? I also participate in the writing process, so when I'm writing those characters, I'm living and becoming each one of them. If there is judgment, there won't be faith. You can't be faithful to characters you're judging."

It's a fitting note to end on for a film that, by its makers' own account, was built entirely to resist easy verdicts and to trust its audience to sit, uncomfortably, in the grey.