School Of Lies (Disney + Hotstar, 8 Episodes)
Rating: ** ½
Ever since I saw cinematographer-director Avinash Arun’s Marathi feature film Killa I’ve been fascinated by his use of colours to project emotions that would otherwise be invisible to the naked eye. The chosen palate in Arun’s webseries School Of Lies conveys the feeling of cutouts from an illustrated book on abuse and punishment; not much of the latter , but nonetheless atonement and divine justice play a big hand in this unnecessarily complicated jigsaw puzzle.
Set in a boarding school at a hillstation School Of Lies is problematic from the start. The young children and teenagers are shown to be discussing the disappearance of a child student Shakti(Vir Pachisia) whom we get to see intermittently on the run with a boy his own age named Chanchal who is not from the boarding school.
The message of the underprivileged ambitious outsider as a looming threat to the safety of the children in a boardingschool is disturbing and distasteful. So is the thought of a school master(Aamir Bashir) sexually abusing a student Vikram(Varin Rupani) beate a regular basis (they are shown to be comfortable in bed) and then getting the boy and his friend brutally beaten by his bully of a brother(Mohan Kapur) is not just pointless, it points to a serious breach in the sacred teacher-student relationship.
Admittedly Avinash Arun’s camera lenses stalk e troubled teachers, students and parents and counselors with a penetrating gaze. But the writing is far too cluttered with colliding events , much of which feels like a traffic pileup.Capable actors like Nirmat Kaur and Geetika Vidya Ohlyan are bogged down by their troubled back stories.
Way too much is being said, and not much of it is pleasant,or even palatable. While the characters seem trapped in the murky web of their own making, the narrative chooses to preserve an elegant aura even as the world created so delicately seems to be crumbling all around.
This is a series about the loss of innocence. It is also about the most heinous power of abuse when power is abused.Educationists as predators is unpardonably unacceptable.Strangely the enormity of the crime is never felt by the audience. The guilt of child abuse seldom touches us in the way it did in,say,The Heart Is Deceitiful Above All Things or Aurora.
The characters are abused and abusive. But they are not allowed to break through the glass partition that separates them from retribution. It is all done in a hushed repressed and dare I say, sanitized tone, almost as if the warning message that comes at the beginning of every episode that no child was abused, prompted the director to keep the proceedings as proper as possible,given the circumstances.
Everyone is hiding something here. After a point we give up trying to figure out who is the guilty and who the perpetrator here.
