Taskaree: The Smuggler's Web

A Neeraj Pandey-created film or series comes with a specific aesthetic: neither television plus nor streaming pulp. Or perhaps both at once. To be fair, this treatment has remained consistent over the years. You know what to expect from the filmmaking: physical momentum is used to manufacture the illusion of narrative intellect. There are those long tracking shots of characters walking importantly from one space to another and one mood to another. The camera and background score move faster than the plot; they work overtime to defeat inertia and convey a sense of coolth and cleverness. Even if people are merely looking at one another, the lens rotates around their bodies in circles and sometimes follows their gaze as if there’s a reveal of Big Foot at the end of every shot. There’s the fake-flashback formula; an incomplete scene or conversation plays out at first only for the story to later show the full scene/conversation that conveniently omitted the twist. And there’s the ‘cultural’ colour-grading: the Middle East is yellow-sepia, Europe is blue, India is yellow-blue, Africa is green, the sky changes tones like an errant disco ball rather than AQI markers.

Neeraj Pandey has this knack for taking us to those forbidden spaces where offenders and upholders of the law become two sides of the same coin. He teases you with dribs and drabs of information, making us guess which side his characters would flip. This week, with Taskaree, the coin is golden, and the field of special ops is Mumbai International Airport. Celebrating the unsung heroes of India’s customs department, the series portrays their battles against organised crime with limited firepower.

Neeraj Pandey’s latest Netflix series, Taskaree: The Smuggler’s Web, rests on ingenuity. It foregrounds a world that is mostly wrapped in intrigue and focuses on a group of people who aren’t necessarily under the spotlight. In a streaming landscape crowded with an assembly line of thrillers, even an inventive premise counts a great deal, and Pandey offers it in plenty. His latest show is concerned with the machinery of customs and widespread smuggling syndicates that continue to bypass them — a swing that pays off till it does not.

For the protagonist and narrator of Taskaree: The Smuggler’s Web, rectitude is heroism. There are other traits, too, that define the Customs officer - courage under fire, bravado in the face of danger, and quick thinking in the midst of systemic sloth. Customs superintendent Arjun Meena (Emraan Hashmi) possesses all the above qualities in abundance, in addition to his ability to lead by example. But nothing is more important to him and his handpicked colleagues than probity. So much so that one team member disowns his family and fiancée because of their failure to understand his principles.

There was a time when the bad guys in Bollywood used to be mainly smugglers. Remember that word sardonically mouthed by the lanky Anthony Gonsalves? ‘Biscuit’, he says, in an iconic Amar Akbar Anthony scene, and we see exactly what he’s referring to: a briefcase filled with shiny gold ‘biscuits’. That was back in the restrictive 70s, when everything had to be smuggled in. Post-liberalisation, with foreign exchange freely available and international travel becoming easier, villainy shifted to other spheres. Or at least that’s what the movies showed us.

Many Hindi films on smuggling, aka taskaree, have delighted audiences since the days of the iconic ‘Deewar’. So what can ‘Taskaree: The Smugglers Web’ bring to the table? Coming from the stable of a brilliant director like Neeraj Pandey, who gave us the ultimate heist film ‘Special 26’, and headlined by a fine actor like Emraan Hashmi, expectations build up.