‘Traffic’ is a Hindi movie, The remake of the Malayalam hit

There have been unauthorised Hindi-language copies of Southern films. Then there were authorised remakes. These days we have Southern directors remaking their own films in the North Indian language. That is progress in an industry with a famously lax attitude when it comes to copyright. Hiring Malayalam director Rajesh Pillai to reshoot his own film for a nationwide viewers should have been as easy as switching on the engine.

Pillai’s 2011 Malayalam hit smartly managed to put together elements from the Mexican movie Amores Perros and a real-life incident involved with a heart transplant in Chennai in 2009. Doctors performed closely with the Chennai traffic police to ensure a clear corridor for an ambulance carrying a heart which needed to be transplanted. The broadly publicized incident proven that when our notoriously addle-brained citizens manage to get their act with each other, they can place on one solid show.

In Traffic, a number of lives intersect over a heart transplant procedure: the parents of a young man who lies brain dead in a hospital in Mumbai, the star actor and his wife whose rapidly diminishing child in Pune is the intended receiver of the patient’s heart, a corrupt traffic constable who becomes to prove himself while he is inquired to drive the vehicle bearing the vital organ among the two cities, the enthusiastic traffic police chief who seem to oversees the operation, and a murderous doctor.

In the Malayalam movie, the a variety of plot strands are connected to the point of throttling narrative logic. Yet, Pillai and writers Sanjay and Bobby produce it work by creating legitimate characters and a sense of pressure and moral imperative to the business of protecting a rich man’s daughter. The Hindi edition straightens out the creases in the original, and we are sure somebody is feeling very proud of having dumped the numerous flashbacks and the incessant inter-cutting in between storylines.

But in the approach, the essence of the original - and the purpose it worked with audiences - has been lost. There is non-e of the energy and drive in the Hindi Traffic. There is a beating heart patiently waiting to be transported and transplanted and all feasible resources are deployed to do so, but Pillai is incapable to recreate the same sense of emergency. The characters are dull and unlikable and are far more poorly sketched when compared with the original. The acting is strictly effective despite such names as Manoj Bajpayee, Prosenjit and Sachin Khedekar in the cast.

The actor, Dev Kapoor (Prosenjit), puts remarkable pressure on the potential donor’s family by means of politicians (even the Governor tends to make a call on his behalf) , which is the only cause the entire traffic police department is galvanised into actions. The operation provides the characters of the traffic constable (Bajpayee) and a doctor with murder on his mind (Parambrata Chatterjee) a opportunity to redeem themselves. In this movie’s structure of relative morality and celebration of entitlement and opportunity, nobody stops to ask whether such efforts would have been taken for a poorer and less attached patient. No matter whether it’s the original or the remake, Traffic shows that when you are influential and wealthy, the road ahead will be absolutely free of obstacles and all signals will miraculously transform green with a few phone calls.