Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year (2009)
Shimit Amin
Hindi
Director Shimit Amin’s instinctive love for the underdog and screenwriter Jaideep Sahni’s seeming distaste for Big Business come together in Rocket Singh – a movie that is as perceptive and entertaining as it is naïve and predictable. It’s Rocky for the Generation Sell that pits corporate rapacity against homespun entrepreneurship. Ranbir Kapoor plays Hapreet – a barely-adequate everyman who tries to make his way through modern professional landscape – with great intelligence, internalizing the character’s religious repression, his lack of parental identification and the subsequent absence of retributive masculinity. Amin’s cheesecake aesthetic, on the other hand, recalls Wes Anderson and Edgar Wright in equal measure, with its geometric mise en scène, affinity for strong horizontals, the easy-on-the-eye symmetric composition, shrewd visual detailing and, especially, the sprightly editing, which telescopes actions with split second shots while letting conversations take their own pace. The office and its peripheral spaces are moral zones in Rocket Singh that define and delimit character behaviour. The workplace here is a veritable battle field – a characteristically male playground – fraught with surveillance and territorial dispute. (The cubicles’ layout itself reminds us of trench warfare.) The film succeeds in conveying to a good extent the crushing power of concentrated capital. And Amin is capable of fine subtlety, as is clear from the honesty and pronounced everyday quality of some of the sequences. But he is equally prone to repetition and overemphasis. Rocket Singh is a film that wants to put a human face on commercial enterprise, and it’s unable to understand corporate ruthlessness without putting grimacing human faces on to it. It appears to be unaware that modern offices are exactly what it laments they aren’t – employee-friendly, customer-oriented and rewarding of new ideas. Perhaps it makes for better drama this way. But it also immunizes its object of critique by characterizing its fallibility as product of human misconduct – big businesses are corrupt because the people running them are. Hapreet advices his boss towards the end: “Business is not numbers, business is people.” Guess what, that’s what every CEO says too.
PS: I admit I had fun throughout trying to guess what colour turban Ranbir Kapoor will come wearing next.
The Seventh Art 
June 6, 2015 at 12:53 am
It is a very good movie and this review helped me a lot to understand the finer elements of its script and narrative.
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June 6, 2015 at 8:51 am
I’m glad to hear that, Khalid.
Cheers!
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June 6, 2015 at 12:05 pm
“The office and its peripheral spaces are moral zones in Rocket Singh that define and delimit character behaviour. ”
To clarify – The five spaces around the office floor (the roof, the cafe, the parking, the staircase and the bathroom) become zones that permit the bending of the rigid gender and class relations that mark the hierarchisized geography of the workplace (the chief’s room>the middle manager’s cube>the sales department>reception).
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June 7, 2015 at 3:30 am
‘the hierarchisized geography of the workplace’
It is a logical choice then that the final exchange between Harpreet and the boss is shot inside a supermarket, a place where the floor plan divides the available space into absolutely equal, homogeneous, narrow, oblong sections indistinguishable from one other. Also, in that it features an absolutely strange choice of lens: the actors are made to stand in the middle of a sea of neon-blur, their immediate physical environment – possibly full of objects and clues that may establish the difference in their positions – completely dissolved.
The film’s most sympathetic tendencies seem to have actively devolved into very strategic pandering in the years since and seem entirely devoid of Jaideep Sahni’s naive passion, actually.
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June 11, 2015 at 9:31 pm
Yes, Anuj. Great point. The choices of the final scene really intrigued me, especially because they are deliberate and thought through. Any other film would have had it in a more neutral space such as his house.
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