Filmi Geek

7 khoon maaf (2011)

७ खून माफ़

Dir. Vishal Bhardwaj

I liked 7 khoon maaf ("7 murders forgiven") so much that I watched it twice in a week, and I am still not sure what to make of it.  Dark, weird, and bold, this strange Vishal Bhardwaj drama is part psychological study, part mystery, and part black comedy.  It is uneven in parts, lurching in tone from vignette to vignette.  These shifts can be confusing, leaving the viewer unsure which bits are earnest and which ironic.  But the weird, slightly disorienting effect is marvelously compelling.  Propelled by superb photography and a number of chillingly engaging performances, 7 khoon maaf is a visit to a sinister carnival's fun house.  It's discomfiting and even disturbing at times, and when it's over you can't wait to do it again, and bring your friends. 

Adapted from Ruskin Bond's story Susanna's Seven Husbands, 7 khoon maaf tells the story of Susanna Anna-Maria Johannes (Priyanka Chopra), a wealthy Christian woman whose long procession of husbands each meets an untimely and often violent demise.  Like another Ruskin Bond story adapted into movie form, Junoon, the story explores a dark psychology, the dangerous corners of a passionate mind.  But where Junoon anchors its study in the larger historical context of the Sepoy Mutiny, lending it a broader allegorical reading, 7 khoon maaf keeps its focus inward, on the mind of Susanna herself and, to a lesser extent, the mind of the young man who narrates the tale.  That young man, Arun (Vivaan Shah), catches Susanna's attention as a boy servant in her household; she finances his schooling and eventually sends him to study medicine, and a bond of love develops between them that secures Arun's loyalty to her well into adulthood, even years after losing touch with her.  As Arun narrates Susanna's tale to his own wife (Konkona Sen Sharma, in a saucy and poignant cameo), Arun makes himself vulnerable by exposing the depth of his bond to Susanna and just how much he is willing to risk to protect her.  But the real story is what drives Susanna.

The story of each of Susanna's husbands - how they meet, their courtship, and ultimately how they die - creates a separate vignette or episode within the movie, and these range from sad, to disturbing, to disturbingly funny.  In each vignette, Susanna tries on a different persona - a new style of dress, a new religion, even a new name.  Arun provides a facile, oversimplified explanation for Susanna's many romances; he says that she "looks for her father in every man she meets."  But while her experimentations do have the air of a desperate search, it is as much a search for her own identity as a search for her father.  And over time the search leaves her weary - by the fifth husband, Inspector Keemat Lal (Annu Kapoor), she is bored and resigned to the ritual of courtship, marriage, and murder - and eventually insane.  It is only through obliteration of all identities - her own death and rebirth - that Susanna can find peace, and that is why her seventh and final marriage is with a partner who has himself died and been reborn. 

Each vignette, too, reveals a bit more about the forces the lead to the husbands' deaths.  Is Susanna herself killing them?  Is her small cadre of loyal misfit servants doing the dirty work for her?  If so, are they acting on their own to protect her, or with her knowledge and at her bidding?  These questions are unanswered at first, but the truths shimmer into focus with satisfying pace as the narrative unfolds.

Part of the movie's dark thrill lies in its moral ambiguity.  Some of Susanna's husbands are horrible, vicious men, for sure, but others are more sympathetic or even hapless victims.  And even in the case of the worst abuser, the third husband - a seductively dashing Kashmiri poet (Irrfan Khan) who gets sexual satisfaction from beating the snot out of Susanna - Arun asks why he had to die; could Susanna not just have left him?  It's a fair question; Susanna and her servants operate in a constantly shifting landscape of revenge, protection, defense, and ennui that combine with the movie's shifts in tone to produce an effect that is pleasingly unsettling.  The scenes with the poet are difficult to watch - Irrfan Khan is smolderingly sexy in this role, and his character recites the most beautiful and thoughtful lines, but there is no beauty in the bruises he leaves on Susanna's body and psyche, and despite Arun's question it's easy to get behind the sneering revenge in his fate.  Likewise the first husband, Major Edwin Rodrigues (Neil Nitin Mukesh),  a plainly vicious, insecure man.   Wounded in battle, he asserts his fragile manhood in violent outbursts and creepy, if not explicitly abusive, displays of sexual dominance over Susanna; when he leeringly caresses her face with the stump of his amputated leg, it is not hard to imagine still more vile treatment to come, and not hard to sigh with relief at his death - which, being the first in the film, is also the most plausibly dismissed as an accident. 

But this sense of justice served evaporates quickly.  And in a brilliant directorial maneuver by Bhardwaj, the most cold-blooded and least justifiable of the deaths come in the most comical of the vignettes.  The fourth husband, a Russian spy named Vronsky (Aleksandr Dyachenko) is batted around like a mouse in the paws of Susanna and her servants, as they have some sport with him before he is dispatched.  This scene is maniacally chilling and also very funny.   And the poor smitten Inspector Keemat Lal, whose courtship is suffered by a bored, eye-rollingly unimpressed Susanna, encounters death by punchline in a Viagra overdose.  In both cases the viewer  is left snickering at the joke, and at the very same time thinking that Susanna has perhaps gone more than a bridge too far. 

Finally, there is Priyanka Chopra, the heartbeat that drives every aspect of 7 khoon maaf.  I am fully sold on Priyanka Chopra as an actor - I was already most of the way there after seeing Barfi - and it is her empathy, her portrayal of Susanna's confusion and desperation and fear and her ultimate resignation that knits these almost disparate vignettes together into a compelling and cohesive story.   Most of the other performances are strong as well - several of the husbands I have mentioned, and Susanna's sideshow freak gallery of loyal servants (Shashi Malviya, Harish Khanna, and Usha Uthup) are also magnificent.   But these performances would not be enough to carry the movie were Priyanka Chopra not up to the task of embodying the shape-shifting peregrinations of Susanna across the decades that the narrative spans.  It is a remarkable performance that makes for a remarkable, bizarre, and utterly compelling movie. 

Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl (2011)

Dir. Maneesh Sharma

Con movies are fun. Watching a likable, charismatic hero pull off a big, bold heist is simply satisfying. The characters don't even need to have the moral high ground for a movie to be fun and loveable - Bunty aur Babli are no Robin Hoods but one can't help rooting for them every step of the way. And when the con is for a morally good cause - like the fast one pulled in Bluffmaster to teach the hero the error of his ways - it can be even easier to get behind.

Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl is a movie of this type - four women band together to out-con a con man who has taken three of them for a ride. The women are clearly on the side of justice, even if their extralegal methods are somewhat unconventional, and this, plus some sparkling and lively performances, makes them very sympathetic. Their target (Ranveer Singh), who goes by many names - they mostly refer to him as Bloody Kamina, or BK - is, in contrast, hardly sympathetic at all. He has a handsome smile but otherwise a smarmy, slimy air; knowing what he's made of makes it hard to dredge up any concern for him at all.

And that, unfortunately, undermines the central twist of the film. Ishika (Anushka Sharma), the talented, ruthless salesgirl that BK's three victims hire to put the con on him, supposedly falls in love with BK, and he with her. It's a nice idea, but it is the weakest aspect of the movie. After their cracklingly effective chemistry in Band baaja baaraat - one that earned an absolutely breathless gushing review from me - here Anushka Sharma and Ranveer Singh fall a bit flat. Part of the reason is that the movie does not spend as much time laying a foundation for their connection as Band baaja baaraat did; in that movie, the relationship between their characters was central to every aspect of the film, while here it is considerably more incidental. But worse than that, there is nothing substantive for Ishika and BK to build a relationship upon. Each has lied about who they are; each plays a role in hopes of fooling the other. On what basis do they fall in love? Only because the script says so, and this is the most unsatisfying kind of film romance. As good as they were with the strongly scripted character arcs of Band baaja baaraat, Anushka and Ranveer do not seem up to the task of filling in the holes here.

There is more mild dissatisfaction in the movie's resolution. Although BK earns his redemption, he does so by getting the better of the women. So instead of triumph, the women - who have already suffered quite a bit at BK's hands - are delivered a humiliating defeat. They do not cause BK's change of heart through their cleverness; rather, BK on his own does them the kindness of repaying what he conned from them. Despite the best efforts of these very smart, resourceful women, the man remains in control - and it is his volition, not theirs, that determines the ultimate outcome. I reluctantly admit that this didn't bother me much when I watched the movie; I went along fairly uncritically for the ride. But several people have since brought it to my attention, and it has become an irritation to my feminist sensibilities that, once perceived, cannot be unseen. It has soured this otherwise enjoyable movie in my memory.

Despite these weaknesses, though, Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl is entertaining to watch while it is happening, largely on the strength of the characterizations and performances of BK's three victims. These women are cleanly and consistently written, individual and each charming in her own way. The spearhead of the operation to beat BK at his own game is Raina (Dipannita Sharma), a resourceful and ambitious young executive who brings all her business skill and contacts to bear on her mission of revenge. It's satisfying to watch Raina channel her anger - and embarrassment - at having been conned, focusing it on a methodical, business-like approach to turning the tables on BK. And  BK's most timid victim, the young Lucknowi widow Saira (Aditi Sharma), presents the most substantial character arc, as she grows in confidence and strength over the course of the film.

But Parineeti Chopra completely steals the show here in her debut role as BK's third young victim, Dimple. Dimple may be a bundle of Punjabi stereotypes - boisterous, crass, angry - but Parineeti brings her to life with a charming fearlessness. Cursing, yelling, sobbing, gobbling down snacks, frantic with immature jealousy over BK - whatever Parineeti does as Dimple she does with complete abandon. I thrill to see young female actors willing to throw their bodies into thoroughly unglamorous roles. Like Konkona Sen Sharma in Aaja nachle, or Parineeti's older cousin Priyanka Chopra in Barfi, Parineeti Chopra shows impressive readiness to sacrifice conventional sex appeal for the sake of embodying her character and telling a story. The result is a magnificently and thoroughly appealing (if unconventionally so) performance that shines on its own as a compelling reason to watch this movie. One has to look forward to what else this promising young actor can offer.

Talaash (2012)

तलाश

Dir. Reema Kagti

Warning:  This review contains significant spoilers.

Most thrillers have a twist toward the end, a surprise revelation that spills new light on the narrative or yanks the viewer into a new perspective.  The danger for the makers of thrillers is that the full experience of the movie turns on the effectiveness of such moments. Handled well, a thriller's twist can leave a viewer gobsmacked and tingling.  Such thrillers are the ones you watch over and over, looking for clues that hint toward the revelation to come. They are the movies you discuss with your friends, arguing endlessly over what the narrative means. 

Reema Kagti's Talaash ("search") is not one of these thrillers.  Instead, it is two hours of taut, consistent filmmaking craft, undermined in the end by a facile and unsatisfying twist.  The movie features intense performances and a seductive, appealingly creepy noir mood.  But instead of psychological insight or lasting mystery, Talaash's great promise delivers only a hackneyed spook-revenge tale.

Talaash's tagline, "The answer lies within," promises a psychological resolution, and indeed the film could have been a fascinating psychological study of a man broken by loss and guilt.  Had the answer indeed lain within - had the apparition of Rosie (Kareena Kapoor) been not a real live ghost but a hallucinatory construct of Inspector Shekhawat's (Aamir Khan) troubled conscience - Talaash could have had something compelling to say about the waste that unchecked grief can lay to a life and a marriage.  The movie offers much foundation for this kind of study. Deep in denial, Shekhawat orders his wife Roshni (Rani Mukherjee) into therapy.  But he refuses to acknowledge the toll his own grief takes on him, in sleepless nights and unspoken sorrows. In one powerful sequence, Shekhawat remembers and reimagines the preamble to his young son's death, conjuring several alternate histories in which Shekhawat makes different choices that prevent the accident.  This is a man rotting from the inside with his own guilt. 

But this delicate, promising thread is rendered a red herring by Talaash's twist.  As a hallucination, as a manifestation of Shekhawat's troubles, Rosie could have helped lead him toward insight or even redemption.  As a ghost, though, she is just so much voodoo woo-woo with no connection to what happens in Shekhawat's troubled mind, nothing to say about coping with deep grief, a mere plot surprise for its own sake that sheds no light on the central drama of Shekhawat and Roshni's life.  All of that careful psychological exploration is unsatisfyingly wasted.

As alternative to pure psychological study, Talaash could have left its resolution to the viewer.  Part of the thrill of a movie like Inception is that no one knows for certain what really happened in the narrative.  Rewatchings and endless debates lend the movie lasting value - a gift from the filmmaker that keeps on giving.  Talaash, though, leaves no such open questions.  Instead, it is unambiguous that we are to interpret Rosie as a real ghost; Shekhawat finds her body right where she tells him it lies, including the distinctive ring that her apparition wore.  Talaash could have offered a rich array of puzzles to chew on - if Rosie is Shekhawat's figment, what caused Armaan Kapoor to drive his car into the bay?  What does it mean that Shekhawat had a nearly identical accident?  Instead, there's nothing left to debate. 

Thus Talaash is doubly unsatisfying - once in cheating the viewer out of the lasting pleasure of ambiguity, and again in that the certainty it presents is so improbable and lame.  Rosie as vengeful spirit, exacting punishment from those responsible for her death is boring and unsatisfying.  Worse, it is without meaningful connection to Shekhawat and Roshni's grief-stricken, troubled marriage.  Indeed, that Rosie is a ghost implies that the mysterious letters they receive from the dead boy are real as well.  Thus Shekhawat and Roshni are absolved of coming to grips with their son's absence, allowed instead to continue to communicate with him. This is not character development; it is a dreadfully facile non-resolution.

It has been pointed out to me that another Reema Kagti film, Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd., also includes a supernatural element - one of its couples has very real superpowers.  Despite the goofy unreality of that device, I unreservedly adore the movie.  There is an important difference in tone, however.  Unlike the gritty street realism of Talaash, Honeymoon Travels has the air of a fable, and each of the couples' stories can both be viewed as a literal vignette and read as a metaphor for some aspect of communication between spouses.  Aspi and Zara's superpowers, which they both had and hid from one another since childhood, stand for all the secrets one keeps from one's partner out of fear of being misunderstood and judged.  In Talaash, Rosie too could have been a rich metaphor.   Instead, she is nothing more than a middling spook, barely worthy of campfire story or urban legend.

Talaash wastes all Reema Kagti's well-crafted moods - the restlessness of the night in Mumbai's red light district, the oppressive dimness of Shekhawat and Roshni's apartment, the creepy wide-eyed friendliness of Roshni's neighbor, Frenny (Shernaz Patel), who claims to speak with the dead.  The movie squanders some marvelous performances too, especially those of Rani Mukherjee and Nawazuddin Siddiqui.  Rani is achingly sympathetic in as mature, real, and unglamorous a role as she has ever done (her work in Yuva compares).  For all I love Rani's effervescent cuteness in romantic comedies, there is no doubt that she has the chops for a role like this one, and I love to see directors give her the chance to use them.  Siddiqui is fascinatingly physical and diminutive as a hungry errand-boy who opportunistically gets involved in a blackmail scheme connected to Shekhawat's investigation of Armaan Kapoor's death.  It is a shame that Talaash wasted all these great efforts with its supernatural faffing about.  What had all the makings of a very memorable movie is considerably weakened instead, to a merely passable ghost story.