12th Fail review – Indian exam yarn offers hope on overcoming corruption and poverty

Perhaps it’s only an accident of scheduling, but you could read this film as a little cinematic pep talk for young people going back to education after their half-term rest. It’s certainly a warm, if sentimental, paean to the idea that success in India, despite endemic corruption and the caste system, can still be achieved through meritocratic means.

The vehicle for this is the semi-true parable of Manoj Kumar Sharma (Vikrant Massey), the middle child of a family of farmers from Chambal (a region known for its bandits, according to the voiceover narration). Oppressed by crooked local cops and a mayor who demands bribes for everything, Manoj accepts the life savings of his peppery grandmother (Sarita Joshi) to go to Delhi and take the challenging civil service exams that will allow him to become a police officer.

However, as a private coach advises a room full of aspiring students at one point, passing these exams is just like playing snakes and ladders, with one failure sending you back to the beginning and only a finite number of chances before you’re disqualified.

En route to the big city, Manoj falls asleep on the bus and loses all his money when someone steals his suitcase. At a cafe, Manoj meets fellow aspiring student Pritam Pandey (Anant Vijay Joshi). He buys him lunch and gives him a place to crash in Delhi, as they both embark on a long, arduous series of failed attempts and “restarts” – the latter term forming the refrain in a pop song that’s played throughout, in classic Indian cinema fashion.

Along the way, Manoj falls in love with the poised Shraddha (Medha Shankar), a student who gave up being a doctor when she had to treat a young girl who died from abuse, a horror that motivates Shraddha to bring abusers and the like to justice. But will her posh family accept her marrying Manoj, who at one point is forced to work in a flour mill for 15 hours a day to send money home, while he spends further six hours studying, leaving him only three hours to sleep every night?

Writer-director Vidhu Vinod Chopra keeps pointing out how Manoj’s success is ultimately a kind of arithmetic problem, especially when he learns the secret to passing a key set of exams is learning how to write a dozen 200-word essays in an allotted amount of time. The other big didactic message here is that cheaters never prosper –although the film doesn’t shy away from recognising there’s still a lot of prejudice and bias in the system, whichmakes life tough for guys like Manoj.

But it all pulls together very satisfactorily and it’s hard not to smile at sequence of photos at the end that show the real Manoj and Shraddha posing with the actors who play them on screen; the sappiest of touches, but one that always gets you.

• 12th Fail is released on 27 October worldwide.