Director: Sharvi
Writer: Sharvi
Cast: Maanav, Maria Pinto
Running time: 1hr 23mins
The trailer for Do Over suggests that it is “based on true events”, and while I have noted before that this kind of promise usually triggers my bullshit alarm, for once I have no problem in believing that. This is every part dull enough to be rooted in 100% real life. In fact, at times, the pacing of the film is so slow that it feels like you might as well be watching a live-feed of a man’s daily routine. That is exactly as excruciating as it sounds.
Mononymous writer-director Sharvi’s script suffers from a number of issues, but the key one is that it is intensely repetitive. The first vignette of story follows Sivakumar (Maanav) as he determinedly destroys his life, ignoring the pleas of his wife Uma (Maria Pinto) to try and do something about his uncontrollable alcoholism – and losing his family and his job in the process. Three almost identicle days unfold with Siva returning home pissed out of his skull, slurring through excuses about office parties getting out of hand, and waking up to eat breakfast prepared by Uma the following day.
A film about addiction might well follow this pattern, and still work, because it is a cycle of self-destruction. But the films which do this most effectively still find space to hint at what is keeping their loved ones in the picture – usually a cinematic addict still has some vestige of personality about them, hinting at the earlier version of themselves everyone else loved. But Siva is a charmless jerk – and beyond failing to show any of the qualities that might have seen Uma fall for him, he doesn’t even present any affection to his young daughter Megha.
The problem with that is, Siva is our main character – and now we have nothing to relate to. He is presented as a mean, selfish man, and so there is no incentive for us to hope he can turn things around, or find a way to claw his way back into Megha or Uma’s hearts. That’s the narrative arc his character is clearly destined for – and we are divested from it even before we realise it is going to take a number more protracted, repetitive, humourless scenes to get there.
In the interim, Sharvi subjects us to two humongous montages of almost nothing. The first follows Siva as he stumbles through the streets of an unspecified city in India. In this time, we see him eat, drink, slump, repeat in a seemingly endless circle of nothing – only interrupted when he takes a moment (or five) to throw up. That particular clip stretches on for several minutes, bringing to mind the infamous ‘Gary pukes forever’ scene from Team America: World Police – probably not a film you would want to emulate while trying to make any kind of serious point.
After inevitably choosing to get his act together (a problematic angle on tackling addiction, which suggests that alcoholism is a choice, an assumption which, were we to humour, would paint our ‘hero’ in an even worse light), Siva attends rehab. At this mid-point, hoping to get us pumped up for this redemption arc, the film cuts to a still motivational image of Siva with the caption “I am not struggling. You are witnessing my rebirth.” But rather than helping us identify with a man who has hit rock bottom, and is determined to turn things around, this phrasing feels emotionally dishonest; something that would be hissed by a Thomas Harris villain, desperate to be taken seriously.
Moving on, and determined to get his life back on track, Siva also commences a search for employment as an accountant – an enthralling job which he suggests is his “passion” – only to be turned down multiple times. Interviewing with seemingly every company in the country, we are treated to another long, long sequence of seeing the same thing over and over again.
His CV, we are ensured by every managing director in the industry, is impeccable. But the fact he lost his last job due to alcoholism means he has demonstrated “poor character”, and so nobody in their right mind would touch him. It is a valid point, one which could be built into a more compelling case for us to care about Siva – because this is a real-world issue that we can relate to. There are very few opportunities for someone who has battled addiction, or has a criminal record, or has been black-listed for some other reason. And the causes of those issues rarely lay solely with the individual – so ultimately, they are asked to pay an insurmountable debt to society for something that they have changed, and wasn’t only their fault in the first place.
Unfortunately, Sharvi seems completely disinterested in exploring what factors might have pushed Siva to drinking his problems away. And he seems unwilling to have his lead character argue with his treatment at all – meekly submitting to the self-righteous lecturing of a managerial class most likely born into more powerful and privileged social stations than him.
Perhaps most unforgivably, Sharvi also makes no space in his film for the process of Siva reuniting with Uma and their daughter. Once he has a job, there is just a short shot of the family happily exiting a shopping centre, having purchased something. Beyond the grimly materialistic take this gives us on the nature of all human relationships, it also further prevents us from understanding the family’s connection on a more personal level, and deprives us from any material we need to relate to them.
There could have been scenes where Siva tries to break down walls with Uma, by talking wistfully about how they met, or his feelings on their wedding day, or when their daughter was born. There could have been a precious moment where Siva initially struggles to reconnect with Megha, but wins her trust by calling back to a running joke the pair referenced in an early scene – or by fixing a beloved toy. Anything. But those would have required the removal of at least two of the excruciating on-the-rails interview scenes, or possibly eaten into the obscenely patronising final speech – where Siva addresses us directly to let the audience know that our success is only down to us, and if we have a problem, we should just pull up our bootstraps and solve it, or face the consequences.
Overall, this makes it difficult to work out exactly what to think of Do Over. In some ways it seems to have its heart in kind of the right place – encouraging people suffering alcoholism to take a look at themselves, think about how they are hurting other people, and seek help for their condition, even if it is a bit over simplistic about how that process works. At the same time, it suggests that too many people are written off for mistakes they make earlier in their lives. But often in the same scene, Sharvi’s story seems to be digging at addicts in a way that is entirely unhelpful, presenting them as feckless and self-absorbed, without any vestige of humanity – justifying the way that society’s rich and powerful treat them in the process.
There are not many saving graces here. Some of the cinematography is nice. The audio mastering is competent. The actors do reasonably well with what they are given. But at its heart, this slow-moving non-story feels hollow – either because it doesn’t know how to humanise its characters, and reach out to the audience in the process, or because it does not care to.