17 Mayıs 2012 Perşembe

KAHAANI: MOVIE REVIEW

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Cast:Vidya Balan, Parambrata Chaterjee, Nawazuddin Siddiqui Director:Sujoy GhoshRuntime:125 min. Verdict:Mediocrity. And a cheat. Genre:Thriller, Drama
                Kahaani is mostly shoddy. And an exercise not in misdirection but flat-outcheating. Consider the opening sequence, and how Hitchcock’s lessons have beenthoroughly lost in translation, and how the film’s subsequent set-pieces, theexistence of whom is realized only in retrospect (as some sort of appendage),are mostly, well, silly. And while we’re at it, let us be charitable and ignorethe film’s obsessive compulsion to cut almost every second, if not sooner, andinduce something close to a headache. That it is immensely grating, so much sothat our own compulsions (thank you DVDs) almost want to hit the imaginarypause button and rewind the damn thing. Irrespective of the moment, or thesequence, or any other variable, Kahaaninever ever pulls its foot off the one-second cutting, and one might evensuspect the hand of an auto-edit tool. Dear reader, if you’ve any plans to staywith this film, you just have to bite the bullet and hope your viewing systemplays along with that forced rhythm. I would be lying if I claim that mine did,but it almost went the distance. So yeah, let’s be charitable and move on.                 To the opening sequence. We’reintroduced to a lab-rat. And a masked man holding between forceps a sinister littlesphere. [Fact: 473 cuts have been spent on us till now]. The sphere drops, therat drops, and all of its friends in the nearby compartments drop too. Dead. Wecut to the hustle and bustle and shaky camerawork of daily city-life. Near ametro station. A schoolboy clutches to his schoolbag just as he would hold onto his dear life. Since this moment comes right on the heels of the lab-rat,and we’re in the midst of a crowd containing faces we barely know, the randomcuts/jumps from one face to next basically screaming “anonymous people”, thefear on the schoolboy’s face and his bag become some sort of a red herring. Andsince all these anonymous people indulging in everyday small-talk are obliviousto the existence of this schoolboy, he becomes Hitchcock’s ticking time-bomb. Now,comes the part to engage the audience. I mean, if it were merely thedisconnected equation of the crowd versus the schoolboy, since the former hasbeen set up as absolutely incapable of looking beyond itself, the sequencebecomes sort of fatalistic. So, enter a group of other school kids who alsoprovide the screenwriter the services of a bully, thus enabling the anonymouscrowd to interact with the red herring. And, as an add-on, a man looking at thebags, acting as an agent of our fear, trying to resolve the matter of thistime-bomb. I say, beyond the “everyday conversations” and “bullying” andnauseating snatch-and-cut strategy, it’s mostly fine and dandy. Except for thebizarre notion that a schoolbag might contain a chemical weapon. I mean, yourmind starts to wander off in a hundred different directions, especially in thewake of Elvia Cortés and Brian Douglas Wells, and wonder how thehell the terrorist convinced a school kid to become a live weapon. A woman andher mother (-in-law?) are wondering about their kid’s milk-bottle, which theformer seems to have forgotten. One of them gets up, I don’t know which, and itis less a reflection of my poor memory and more about the inter-replaceablecharacterization that Mr. Ghosh’s filmmaking serves us with. The bottle showsup. And just about the same time the bullies manage to reveal for us that theschoolbag contained a harmless comic (or something to that effect). The bottleis made of glass, and it drops, and when it breaks just as the sphere did inthe lab. Cut. A little pan along the train as everybody in the train is deep insleep. To never wake up again. The school kid? Gone. The man? Gone. Thebullies? Gone. Is this what you would call a clever resolution of tension, ormisdirection? Or would you call it cheating? I mean, the bottle doesn’tannounce its presence until the final few moments. Mr. Ghosh might as well havecut to the engine driver discovering a bomb under his seat and I would havebeen just as bummed.                 This set-piece cross-cuttingstrategy is what makes for a lot of Kahaani.It is Mr. Ghosh’s go-to device for generating tension, and despite the numberof attempts, he just doesn’t get it right. Not once. For various reasons. Forinstance, a sequence down at an old accounts office, that fails miserablybecause of the lack of a coherent establishment of the geography of the spaceand his inexplicable insistence on close-ups and medium-shots. Where a singleoverhead shot from the top of a fan, or someplace else, could draw the relativepositions, Mr. Ghosh keeps cutting from one to the other, and we are left withthe unenviable task of drawing the imaginary lines. Tension needs completeknowledge, or at least considerably more knowledge than the players involved. Andsince much of the film, with its constant expositions, observations worthy of Ajit Banerjee (thattea-glass connection is the sort of stuff I’ll tell my grandkids about) and generallyshort-term memory span reminded me of ACP Pradyuman and his merry men, we perhapsought to move on and over and consider the narration. So yeah, SPOILER ALERTS in the paragraphs ahead! Theold accounts office again. And the file of Milan Damji, the terrorist the IB islooking for the past two years. Why would it still be there? Unless, the IBnever came across it, in which case they are a bunch of nincompoops. Or worse.Which doesn’t stand consistent with the rest of the film. Assume, for aninstance, they intentionally planted the document there for Vidya Bagchi (Ms.Balan) to find it, and note the address on it, and let the enemy react to hermove. By sending a contract killer, who also happens to close the chapter onthree other people. Honestly, if usingVidya to lead them to their man was the bureau’s masterplan, I fail to imaginehow they could possibly have fared any worse had they followed the breadcrumbsthemselves. Especially when they knew the mole was within their organization. Adifferent, probably a more telling outcome of this old accounts officeplot-device is Mr. Ghosh giving the game away. We’ve seen her husband ArnabBagchi, it’s a familiar face (Mr. Indraneil Sengupta, although I didn’t knowhis name I recognized him from those VIP Frenchie advertisements), and we seethe same face on the file. Yet, neither Vidya(and the script) make much, or anyado about this huge coincidence, nordo they make us privy do any degree of conflict on her part, because, hey, thisis the real world, and such a resemblance (for sure this isn’t Andaz Apna Apna) should naturallyentertain thoughts about an unfaithful husband. On the bureau’s part they failto observe this lapse in “normal” human behavior (as opposed to Vidyashattering us with the first-name familiarity thing), and so they still emergeas authoritarian nincompoops. And since Ishqiya exists(a direct influence on the proceedings here), the twist ending is not reallyall that twisty. Screw the plot, I say. Especially something asreverse-engineered as this. What I care about is how different a film is withrespect to its Wikipedia plot-entry. Kahaaniisn’t. Not one bit. Not even with those Kolkata-showcasing cutaways. Here is afilm that is amateurish enough to “establish” its characters by obligatorilygiving them something other than the plot (the HR woman dancing to the tunesought to have been deleted), before knocking them off.  It doesn’t help that Ms. Balan is mostlymediocre here (as she was in her National-award winning performance), or tosnatch a description from my friend Srikanth Srinivasan(who has himself snatched some killer frames from Kuroneko), there’s absolutely no history to her performance. It ismostly bland and without layers. But most importantly Kahaani is a cheat. It serves us with visual clues about theidentity of the husband, only to replace the face later. The events are true,the memories are not. This narrative decision on Mr. Ghosh’s part thoroughlytrivializes the memory of a widow, a widow whose son has been killed in theprocess. His cheap gimmick undermines the tragedy, an act exacerbated by theridiculous nature of his cutting, leaves everything replaceable, including thephoto of a husband, making it not a memento of the past but an aid to a twist(pretty hardcore I say), a twist that is more or less incompetently set up inthe first place. That makes me a little confused – if Kahaani is shoddy because it is immoral, or whether it is the otherway round. I don’t know, the SPOILERS END here.

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