Class of 83 HD Released

 

Directed by Atul Sabharwal and "loosely inspired by" journalist S Hussain Zaidi's non-fiction book The Class of 83: The Punishers of Mumbai Police, this film is about a frustrated senior Mumbai policeman who forms an unauthorised killing squad within the force to shatter the politician-underworld nexus that has made it impossible for honest officers to effectively fight crime.

As with most extra-legal strategies with violence as their cornerstone, soon this one too takes on a life of its own and goes out of the hands of those who initiated it.

Crime and corruption have long been Sabharwal's areas of interest. A decade back, he had written and directed the then-underrated-but-now-cult TV narcotics drama series Powder. Links between corporates, politicians, police and gangsters in Gurgaon were his focus in his debut feature film Aurangzeb (2013) starring Arjun Kapoor, Rishi Kapoor, Prithviraj Sukumaran and Amrita Singh. Sabharwal has now found a perfect match in Zaidi who gets an associate producer credit in Class of '83 and whose books on the Mumbai underworld have yielded several Hindi films including one of the finest works to emerge from the industry in the 21st century: Anurag Kashyap's Black Friday.

Class of '83 is less dramatised than Aurangzeb, its tone more akin to Kashyap's docudrama approach to his masterpiece. It does not play out as a suspense thriller, but as a matter-of-fact chronicle of actual events — precise, concise, credible and as tightly drawn as a leash stretched just short of breaking point.

Bobby Deol here plays Vijay Singh, the dean of a police training institute in Nashik. Class of '83 opens in 1982 with a bunch of students who are excited at the prospect of being taught by a top cop.

This is a film with no time to waste and a director in no mood to waste it. It gets down to business from the opening shot and not a second is squandered thereafter. Abhijeet Deshpande's screenplay and Sabharwal's dialogues have clarity and purpose. The humour in the friends goofing around at the institute, the cutting repartee between them and later scenes once they enter the professional arena all have a real-world feel to them. Sabharwal believes in an economical use of words and shots, and ensures that every moment serves to take the plot forward or add another element to the characterisation.