‘All India Rank’ exists between feeling and showing; it's best described as a series of richly-detailed vignettes that observe the waylaid aspirations of the middle-class in a post-liberalized India
There’s about a 15-year gap between Varun Grover’s All India Rank, a gentle portraiture of the IIT rat race, and Rajkumar Hirani’s 3 Idiots, arguably Hindi cinema’s most glamorized and successful snapshot of IIT life. The decade between these two films is emblematic of the distance Hindi filmmakers have traversed in rewriting coming-of-age storytelling traditions. If Hirani’s film — adapted from Chetan Bhagat’s bestselling Five Point Someone: What not to do at IIT — remained interested in making a statement under the guise of excavating the pressures on India’s youth, then Grover’s directorial debut feels like its antidote.
All India Rank is the kind of film that exists between feeling and showing; perhaps best described as a series of richly-detailed vignettes that observe the waylaid aspirations of the middle-class in a post-liberalized India. It is in fact, the opposite of a statement — a film so attuned to depicting everyday struggles of its characters that it often feels as if nothing is really happening to them outside of what we see onscreen.
The generational inheritance of an expectation
This is both the strength and the flaw of Grover’s directorial debut (he is also credited for the script and lyrics). The biggest case against All India Rank is that its stakes feel familiar simply because its setting has been reduced to a template by the advent of long-form storytelling. In the last five years, Kota and by extension, the business of its education factory, has become a bona fide streaming genre — there is no stylistic, narrative or nostalgic flourish that creators haven’t already mined on shows such as Laakhon Mein Ek (2017) or Kota Factory (2019).
It’s true that much of the film’s perspective on the rigged nature of competitive exams and the bright students trapped within its hold, struggles to have lasting emotional impact, making the proceedings come across as slight. At the same time, assessing the qualities of a film merely by its ability to parade its novelty feels like a mistake, as if missing the point of cinema itself. Filmmaking is an art and a business but it isn’t a competition — the point isn’t for any film to be more inventive than the other films like itself but rather to be inventive in its understanding of its own universe. Even when it feels disjointed and a work-in-progress, All India Rank achieves that standard.
Set in 1997, the film revolves around 17-year-old Vivek’s (newcomer Bodhisattva Sharma) reluctant move from his home in Lucknow to a reputed coaching institute in Kota. For his father (a standout Shashi Bhushan), a middle-class government employee, Vivek’s status as a school-topper is evidence of his son’s potential future as an IIT student. It’s an expectation that becomes a generational inheritance for Vivek, who doesn’t seem too interested in greatness or even, destined for it. All he wants is an ordinary life, too young to know any better and too old to not know his own limitations. But his pleas to his loving and helpless mother (12th Fail’s Geeta Agarwal) are barely enough to stop his father from shipping him away.
The push and pull of two separate lives
In any other film, the story would shift completely to Kota, its canvas would be filled with the friendships, conflicts, and realizations that Vivek stumbles upon in this new phase of his life. His parents would be restricted to the sidelines of their son’s story, their lives nothing more than an afterthought. On the surface, All India Rank follows this very convention but it also breaks it by dividing its time between Lucknow and Kota, between the life that happens to Vivek and the life that goes on without him. It is this push and pull that shapes the specificity of All India Rank.
Grover brings his characteristic humour and wisdom to the Lucknow portions of the film that humanizes the ills of middle-class parenting into something heartbreakingly tender, something in the vein of Basu Chatterjee and Hrishikesh Mukherjee. He draws both Bhushan and Agarwal’s characters with a keen eye, rendering their idiosyncrasies and flaws without belittling their frustrations. On their part, the two actors pair beautifully with each other, their generosity as scene-partners enlivening their chemistry as husband and wife.
The more time Grover spends with Vivek’s parents, the more it becomes clear that All India Rank is the kind of film that is interested in revolving itself around Vivek’s presence as well as his absence. It’s just that the film is stronger when it investigates the consequences of Vivek’s absence — the loneliness of a parent realizing the selfishness of transferring his unmet desires into his barely adult son; the helplessness of a parent being complicit in her son’s unhappiness; the tragedy of time going on still. It is true that All India Rank doesn’t offer any grand revelations, clear answers, and hits a couple of false notes toward the end. But it is also true that All India Rank is a film that strives to be more than just a template.
