All India Rank

An aspirational story, check. A love angle, check. Friends and families, check. Redemption and self-realisation, check. Convincing performance, check. Varun Grover's directorial debut, 'All India Rank', passes most of the criteria needed in a good film and yet, it falls short on entertainment value. Even with a relatable storyline and emotional graph of characters, the Bodhisattva Sharma and Samta Sudiksha-led film fails to make an impact and ends up looking slightly superficial.

There’s a lengthy queue of films about reluctant swotters as blank canvases onto which the ambitions and expectations of others are projected. Grover’s contribution to a well-thumbed list departs from the recent hit 12th Fail, which valourised its striving hero, or 3 Idiots, which derided the IIT rat race but ensured that its hero was a self-made genius. The attempt to tune out the cheerleading that is inevitably heard in classroom dramas is laudable, if not always successful. The film’s low-energy hero and fatalistic mood – the promise of the 1990s notwithstanding – are difficult to sustain over the 101-minute runtime. Grover’s screenplay has a collection of finely written episodes that compensate for Vivek’s feeble, familiar coming-of-age experience.

I did wish that Bundela Madam would have been seen outside of class, though: she should have been given more to do. Overall, I liked that ‘All India Rank’ stays resolutely in minor key, and the fact that it resists dramatisation, even if that invites occasional blandness — life is not hee-hee-ha-ha all the time. It is a choice you can make only when your film is blissfully star-mukt. The kids, who all look ordinary in just the right way, are all right. My favourite has to be the duplicitous Chandan played by Neeraj, as well as the young man who calls the BSc course he has joined a ‘kala naag’. ‘All India Rank’ may tread familiar coming-of-age territory, coming as it does after ‘12th Fail’, but it is very much its own film.