Serious Men: A savage social satire

Serious Men (2020) • View trailer

Four stars. Not rated, with profanity and sexual candor

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.13.20 

It’s bad enough that India’s emboldened Hindu extremists have been attacking and persecuting their fellow Muslims, Christians and Sikhs; matters are worsened by the inflexible caste system that adds an additional layer of oppressive discrimination.

 

In a rare moment of relaxation, young Adi (Aakshath Das) manages to coax a
near-smile from his father, Ayyan (Nawazuddin Siddiqui).

Director Sudhir Mishra takes a ruthless jab at the latter with Serious Men — available via Netflix — which is as brutal a satire as I’ve seen in awhile. The assault is relentless; the script — by Abhijeet Khuman, Bhavesh Mandalia, Niren Bhatt and Nikhil Nair — is a sardonic spin on journalist Manu Joseph’s 2010 novel of the same title (although an initial text crawl suggests that the adaptation is quite loose).

 

Almost nobody emerges unscathed in this indictment of caste, greed, gullibility, opportunism and — to borrow a British phrase — arrogant upper-class twits.

 

Ayyan Mani (the always excellent Nawazuddin Siddiqui) works as a personal assistant to Dr. Arvind Acharya (M. Nassar), a senior astronomer at the ironically named National Institute of Fundamental Research. Ayyan, a Dalit (lower-caste), is treated with undisguised contempt by his boss, a Brahmin (the highest caste) who routinely berates his assistant’s “primitive mind.”

 

Such behavior is institutional, and Ayyan is helpless to surmount the barrier that inherently grants Dr. Acharya a level of respect that (we soon realize) he hardly deserves, while Dalits are shoved into matchbox-size shacks in the city slums. This injustice is even more infuriating because Ayyan is intelligent enough to perceive that his boss is a scoundrel, who has just soaked the government into funding his ludicrous project to prove that Earth is being invaded by alien germs.

 

At first, Ayyan is philosophical about this situation; he and his gentle-natured wife, Oja (Indira Tiwari), enjoy “gaming” the system by (for example) pretending to be higher-caste tourists at a fancy hotel. Ayyan is a second-generation Dalit, and — as he views things — one must be at least fourth-generation, in order to shed the Dalit designation and become an elite who can get away with “doing nothing at all.”

 

When they have a son, and the boy grows old enough to enter the school system, Ayyan hatches a scheme of devious revenge. The boy, Adi (Aakshath Das), is a meek, owl-eyed cherub who — thanks to his eyeglasses and hearing aid — ordinarily would be the natural target of classroom bullies. But Adi is ferociously smart, and — being a child — can catch the attention of the elites who reflexively ignore his father.

 

Ayyan knows this, and exploits the situation. Ruthlessly.

 

Which means that he’s also robbing Adi of his childhood innocence.