Why Cheat India: Review

In his first scene of Why Cheat India, Rakesh (Emraan Hashmi) does the worst thing an Indian moviegoer in 1997 could possibly do: tell someone watching Gupt for the first time that Kajol is the killer. Granted, he’s revealing this to someone who isn’t very nice, but there is such a thing as basic human decency.

That introduction is also a warning that the film may not know how to deal with its central character. The scene begins with a group of friends – including Satyendra (Snigdhadeep Chatterjee), who’s just qualified for a top-flight engineering college – being bullied out of their seats at the cinema hall. The same toughs then try to move Rakesh, who single-handedly beats them up even though one is carrying a gun. This is the only physical violence on Rakesh’s part in the film. The scene isn’t there because it’s in his character; director Soumik Sen probably just wanted a “hero entry" and settled for the easiest one.

The confusion about what Rakesh is supposed to stand for continues through the film. He’s revealed to be an examination fixer, someone who arranges for entrance tests to be taken by brilliant students on behalf of rich, weak ones. Satyendra becomes one such exam-writer, his father’s debt on his behalf making him easy prey. Rakesh is consistently terrible through the film; yet, Sen won’t allow him to become unsympathetic. Instead, he’s given speech after speech in which he paints himself as some sort of Robin Hood, redistributing wealth to poor, smart students.

There were no such delusions in the man on whom Rakesh is clearly modelled. Gordon Gekko (Wall Street, 1987) is one of the great antagonists in movie history because he’s gleefully, wholeheartedly amoral. He exploits young Bud Fox but is also fond of him, much like Rakesh both uses and feels responsible for Satyendra, shepherding him through the early days of college while also putting him on a punishing schedule of proxy exams. Like Gordon, Rakesh is married and involved with another woman. And sure enough, he ends up using Gekko’s famous phrase: greed is good.

There’s another reference, this time from an Indian film. In the scene where Satyendra is on the phone with Rakesh in Jhansi, there’s a poster for Satyajit Ray’s Jana Aranya (1975) on the wall behind him. It’s an apt comparison: Jana Aranya begins with a scene of cheating in an examination hall, and is a story of middle-class dreams and corruption. It’s also a reference for the sake of it. There’s no good reason why there’d be poster of a Bengali art film on a wall in Uttar Pradesh in the late ‘90s (it’s different in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, whose satirical universe allowed for the use of Kumar Shahani and Mani Kaul film posters).

Satyendra fades from the second half of the film, and the narrative – already guilty of repetition – starts to meander. Rakesh attempts a scam similar to the engineering tests, with MBA entrance exams, but with Satyendra out of the picture, there’s less at stake emotionally. I was glad for the return of Nupur, Satyendra’s supportive sister, and the one searching character in the film. She falls for Rakesh, not because he’s particularly charming but because he’s played by Hashmi and it’d be bad for the actor’s image if the female lead wasn’t throwing herself at him. Even with this dispiriting arc, Shreya Dhanwanthary has an affecting low-key presence, and her reading of the line "Bahut meherbani hai" is beautifully bitter.

There are some nice touches. Before starting to write their engineering entrance papers, many of the students place flowers and small figurines on their desks for good luck (Satyendra actually takes his flowers – marigold, auspicious – back home). And there’s Rakesh’s habit of offering prasad to everyone he meets, a constant cleansing of the soul even as he tempts them into sin. Hashmi seems to enjoy himself; if the writing was brighter and the other characters had more agency, the film might have played differently. The best moments are early on, when we’re amongst the dreams of hungry toppers and desperate parents. Once that passes, Why Cheat India becomes just another Hindi film unwilling to admit that its hero is a villain.

This review appeared in Mint.

Bollywood’s accidental politics

Imagine attempting a Hindi film double bill last weekend. You would have begun with The Accidental Prime Minister. Rahul Gandhi looks lost. Sonia Gandhi looks like Nurse Ratched. The UPA government is a cesspool of political machinations. Former prime minister Manmohan Singh, played by Anupam Kher, is soft, feeble. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, appearing at the end in a news clip, is so much livelier.

Next up would have been Uri: The Surgical Strike. Modi’s in this as well, played by Rajit Kapur. Kher’s portrayal of Singh was on the brink of caricature; the audience snickered at the halting, high-pitched voice he assumed. But they don’t laugh in Uri, because Kapur doesn’t say “mitron", doesn’t try to imitate Modi. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) looks as organized and decisive in this film as the Congress looks uncaring and rudderless in the first.

In The Accidental Prime Minister, Singh has to manoeuvre the nuclear deal past the unwilling Gandhis. In Uri, Modi doesn’t hesitate before ordering a strike on Pakistan-administered soil. The films paint a neat composite picture for the undecided voter: The ruling party is tough on terror, tough on Pakistan; the opposition is power-hungry and doesn’t have the stomach for aggressive geopolitics.

In 2008, Hillary Clinton ran a controversial ad in the race for the Democratic Party nomination which asked the question: “It’s 3am (in the White House). Who do you want answering the phone?" Last weekend, the Indian version of this played out in cinemas across the country. But Clinton’s was a paid political ad. This is free publicity. And the timing couldn’t have been sweeter: a few months to go for the general election, one film with an ineffectual challenger, another featuring a capable incumbent.

The day the trailer of The Accidental Prime Minister released, it was shared on Twitter by the official BJP handle. Last weekend, Amit Malviya, head of the BJP IT cell, suggested taking the family to see both films. He also tweeted another video which has a group of stars—Varun Dhawan, Ranbir Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Karan Johar, Ranveer Singh, among others—shouting “Jai Hind" twice (it was a promotion for Uri). “Have we ever heard film stars chanting Jai Hind like this before?" he wrote. “This is what changed in 4 years!"

Bollywood has been chanting “Jai Hind" for some time now. And the BJP and its allies have so successfully cornered the market on vocal nationalism that any film with a patriotic bent can be seen as doing their work. Almost every month last year, some film or the other waved the flag: PadMan, Gold, Satyamev Jayate, Parmanu: The Story Of Pokhran. In Baaghi 2, Tiger Shroff’s army man ties a stone-pelter to his jeep, just like Major Leetul Gogoi did in Kashmir. Later in the film, he pauses while decimating a police station, catches a small plastic India flag mid-air, and places it down carefully. This was greeted with cheers—probably emanating from the same sort of people who harass others for not standing when the national anthem is played.

A lot of this is simple commerce—patriotism is as saleable today as youthful romance was in the 1990s. With this comes opportunism. When Kangana Ranaut praised Modi and spoke against cow slaughter in July last year, it was a soft signal to his base that she’s one of them—and would they please also watch her nationalistic period film? Manikarnika, which stars Ranaut as the queen of Jhansi, who fought the British in the 1850s, is set to release on 25 January—just before Republic Day. The trailer ends with the queen saying that the difference between her and the British is that they want to rule and she wants to serve. This is the same argument Modi used against the Gandhi family in the run-up to the 2014 general election.

Thackeray also releases on 25 January, completing an unusually political month at the movies. There was some shock when Nawazuddin Siddiqui accepted the role of Bal Thackeray, erstwhile leader of the Shiv Sena, in what would likely be a propaganda film (it’s directed by Abhijit Panse, a former Sena member now with the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena). Why would he agree to play the founder of a party whose workers had forced him to pull out of a Ram Leela performance in his UP village? But Siddiqui has never been outspoken politically. It’s unlikely he agrees with the Sena’s ideals, but he probably weighed that against the opportunity the role represented and decided it was worth the bad press. In this he resembles much of the Hindi film fraternity, which—apart from the right-leaning Kher and BJP MP Paresh Rawal (incidentally, stars of The Accidental Prime Minister and Uri)—is establishment-leaning but says as little as it can about politics. Few could even find the courage to support Naseeruddin Shah when he was being threatened for saying he felt worried for his children in today’s India.

Last year, Chalo Jeete Hain, a short film inspired by Modi’s childhood, released. Two feature films on the prime minister are in the works—one starring Vivek Oberoi, the other, Rawal. The Hindi film industry has always flattered those in power, and will continue to do so. Uri and The Accidental Prime Minister may not have started out as propaganda. Yet, by releasing when they did, by opening alongside each other, and by feeding a larger political narrative, that’s what they ended up as.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge, after the release of Uri and The Accidental Prime Minister and before Manikarnika and Thackeray.

The Accidental Prime Minister: Review

Sanjaya Baru was media advisor to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from 2004 to 2008. He later wrote a memoir about this stint called The Accidental Prime Minister, on which Vijay Ratnakar Gutte’s film is based. In his first scene, Baru, played by Akshaye Khanna, turns up in purple jacket, green shirt, blue tie and black trousers. As if this isn’t disruptive enough, he then addresses the camera directly, and continues to do so through the film. I first thought of Kevin Spacey’s asides in House of Cards, but a better fit is the 2015 film The Big Short, another fourth-wall-breaking, multi-character comedy about large, corrupt systems.

It takes little time for The Accidental Prime Minister to start talking about what it’s really talking about. In a scene shortly after the 2004 general elections, before Singh (Anupam Kher) is appointed as prime minister, Rahul Gandhi speaks to his mother, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, in Italian, so the gathered ministers don’t know what’s been said. The charge against Sonia was always that she wasn’t from India, but it’s significant that the one line in Italian in the film is given not to her but to Rahul. After Sonia declines the post of prime minister, the film contrasts the eloquent reaction of Priyanka Gandhi with the confused, incoherent one of Rahul. Barely 10 minutes in, the film’s already asking the question.

It takes about an hour before someone says it outright. “Yeh election Rahul ke bas ka nahin hai". Rahul’s not up to this election.

Now, you can argue that it’s the 2009 general elections being referred to, that Gandhi was green then. But let’s not kid ourselves. In a couple of months, another national election will be upon us. Rahul Gandhi is the face of his party. The Accidental Prime Minister is an invitation for audiences to see him as comical and indecisive and a little foreign. It’s a political ad.

This is a slice of propaganda so blatant that it may as well have been made by the ruling party. Kher is a BJP ideologue and is married to a party MP. The day the trailer released, the BJP’s official handle tweeted it, saying “Was Dr Singh just a regent who was holding on to the PM’s chair till the time heir was ready?" It is, of course, only natural that the party would promote a narrative in which the opposition comes out looking silly. But it’s dispiriting to see the film industry be so obliging.

Kher playing Manmohan Singh is excellent Trojan horse casting: once he’s inside that voice and that unthreatening manner, he can slowly undermine him while appearing to be sympathetic. It’s a sly performance, with the actor subtly turning Singh’s light voice into a meek bleat and exaggerating his halting speech patterns. The impression is of an ineffectual man in the grip of the Gandhis, unable to control his party. It’s difficult to argue with the general accuracy of Kher’s imitation, but great acting is more than mimicry. There’s little empathy for Singh in Kher’s portrayal, only pity.

You know you’re clutching at straws when the most impressive thing about a film is the hair and makeup and casting. All the actors playing real-life politicians, from LK Advani to the corpse of PV Narasimha Rao, really do look the part. There are no songs, thankfully – I don’t think I would have survived a montage of Singh looking pensive as a sad Punjabi number plays on the soundtrack. The background score is so overbearing and all-pervasive you have to wonder if the composers are being paid by the second. Its jaunty rhythms match the parodic mood of Khanna’s performance – a turn better suited to a production with writing on the level of Yes Minister and not a slightly better Indu Sarkar.

In a way, the crudity of technique is only fitting. The Accidental Prime Minister was always going to be a hit job on the Gandhis first and a film second. Suzanne Bernert looks startlingly like Sonia, but doesn’t make any attempt to humanise her, turning her into an expressionless villain. A vampiric-looking Indira, her hand in a strange hook shape, glares down from a portrait. Arjun Mathur’s Rahul is feeble and confused – damaging enough considering he’s in the running for prime minister, but made even worse by the fact that his main opponent is also in cinemas this week.

In Uri: The Surgical Strike, Prime Minister Narendra Modi – played by Rajit Kapur – is shown as decisive and calm under pressure. He gets to say “Jai Hind" while signing off on a covert military mission. Gandhi, on the other hand, tears up his own party’s ordinance. You realise by the end that the film’s title is a warning. It’s saying: Manmohan Singh was the right man for the job. The real accident will be electing Rahul Gandhi as prime minister.

This review appeared in Mint.

Uri: The Surgical Strike: Review

The disclaimer at the start of Uri: The Surgical Strike closes with “…a tribute to armed forces, and a new India". What this new India stands for is made clear later in the film, after terrorists have launched a surprise attack on an Indian army camp at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir. Govind (Paresh Rawal) – a possible stand-in for National Security Advisor Ajit Doval – suggests a retaliatory “surgical" strike, comparing it to Israel’s covert operation to eliminate those responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympics killings. “Yeh naya Hindustan hai," he says. “Yeh ghar mein ghusega bhi, aur maarega bhi (This is the new India. It’ll enter your home, and it’ll kill you too)."

Aditya Dhar’s film, based on actual events from 2016, opens with two setpieces in quick succession.An Indian army convoy is ambushed in Manipur; there’s a gunfight and a truck is blown up. After that, we see Major Vihaan Shergill (Vicky Kaushal) lead an attack on a camp on the Indo-Myanmar border, where a large group of terrorists is gathered. Dhar pulls striking images out of the chaos: a rocket scorching a path through dense foliage, Vihaan walking into fire like some mythic hero. This is the sort of quick, abrasive, coherent action filmmaking that few Hindi films are interested in, let alone pull off, and it’s no surprise that the cinematographer is Mitesh Mirchandani, who worked wonders in Neerja.

These sequences represent the film in microcosm: an attack on India, and India’s immediate response. But there’s a notable difference between the two. The first attack isn’t scored; we only hear the bullets and the yells of the soldiers. The second is accompanied by thumping music. What we’re being told is: stay with the pain of our soldiers when they’re under attack, but enjoy yourself when they’re on the offensive. War isn’t terrible. Only defeat is.

Raazi, a spy thriller released last year, was peacetime filmmaking: character-driven, invested in the subtleties of language, willing to admit that there can be good people on both sides of a cross- border conflict. Uri is wartime filmmaking: taut, clipped, muscular, regimented. Even the household conversations have a militaristic sound to them. Vihaan’s mother’s Alzheimer’s is “aggressively spreading". His sister corrects her daughter’s homework, telling her it’s “more peaceful", not “peacefuler". The child’s father, Karan (Mohit Raina) – Vihaan’s brother-in-law – is killed in the Uri attack. Standing over his body, crying, rain pouring down, she yells out a war cry he taught her. It’s completed by the jawans, and her grief is weaponised.

The Uri attack is again brilliantly executed – the shot that tracks Karan as he races across the camp belongs in a Katherine Bigelow movie. Yet, it also becomes increasingly clear that whenever the film moves away from the battlefield, it doesn’t have the same edge. Dhar’s writing is fine for military speech, but flat in conversations which don’t consist of barked commands. None of the characters have any definition beyond their job – they’re just military men and women or relatives. Vicky Kaushal is a fetching stoic lead, but Vihaan is so close to perfect he’s scarcely real.

Uri resembles Zero Dark Thirty in its factual build-up to the Indian strike, but because the terrorist attack only comes halfway through, the film then has to rush through scenes of surveillance, intel- gathering, spy work and training. Suddenly, we’re checking in with the Indian Space Research Organisation, the Defence Research and Development Organization, a belching Indian mole in Pakistan. The interrogation scene is over in a flash – two suspects tortured, the desired information elicited. This, too, has the suggestion of a new India: individuals and institutions doing whatever it takes to get the job done. Though he isn’t identified by name, Prime Minister Modi (Rajit Kapur in spectacles and a white beard) appears in several scenes as a hands-on commander. A surgical prime minister, and an accidental one, in theatres this week. In an election year, this is the kind of gift money can’t buy.

Vihaan, who’d quit active military duty after the Myanmar border mission to look after his mother (you better believe someone compares serving one’s mother and one’s motherland), returns to lead the surgical strikes. “Is your blood boiling for revenge?" he thunders at his men. Uri doesn’t seem to consider that his brother-in-law’s death might have some effect on Vihaan’s judgment as a leader.Instead, the film conflates desire for retribution on an individual and a national level. So confident is Dhar in the power of patriotic revenge as a narrative hook that he barely creates a villain (the closest the film comes to caricature is casting someone with a hooked nose and flowing hair as the leader of the Uri attack).

The final assault, conducted in the dead of night on Pakistani soil, is a serrated knife of a set piece.Yet, as one terrorist after another is shot, stabbed or blown up, you have to ask yourself what the film hopes this is inducing in the viewer. Boiling blood? Patriotic tingles? I found the first-person shooter efficiency exhausting after a while. As I write this review, I see that Yami Gautam, who plays an intelligence agent in the film, has done a promotional video as her character, in which she asks viewers to help her “interrogate a terrorist" on Google Assistant. They’re advised to say things like “beat him", “punch him" and “cut off finger". More than anything in Uri, this is the new India.

This review appeared in Mint.

Mary Poppins Returns: Review

The hollowest words uttered in Mary Poppins Returns are by Michael Banks when he throws away his beloved kite and says “No looking back." Not only does Rob Marshall’s musical continually peek over its shoulder, Disney’s entire strategy (outside of acquisition) now seems founded on looking back. This is true of Hollywood in general, now well and truly stuck in an endless cycle of repackage and refurbish. Audience cliques, flattered by the illusion of power, have become increasingly hostile to authorial innovation. This suits the studios fine – it’s easy to greenlight the same old hits, slightly modified.

Mary Poppins Returns isn’t a frame-by-frame remake like Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book. It’s a sequel, with the magical nanny – now played by Emily Blunt – returning to the Banks family 25 years after her first visit. But there’s only the illusion of change. Michael (Ben Whishaw), the boy in the original film, has a moustache now, and a perpetually worried look – he’s in financial trouble and has recently lost his wife. We’re also reintroduced to Jane Banks (Emily Mortimer), Michael’s sister, whose labour agitations are a substitution for her mother’s suffragette protests. Mary Poppins is again visiting at a time when the Banks children – Michael’s daughter and two sons – are in danger of being estranged from their father. And it ends, as the first one did, with the father rediscovering his inner child.

The parallels just don’t stop. Dick Van Dyke’s chimneysweep is substituted by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s lamplighter (after all the fun made of Van Dyke’s Cockney accent you’d think they’d shy away from casting another American). The enemy is still Big Finance, represented here by a dry Colin Firth as the bank manager trying to repossess the Banks family home. Bravely, none of the classic musical numbers are revived, though you can hear and see their ghosts in the new ones: “Step in Time" in “Trip a Little Light Fantastic", “Let’s Go Fly a Kite" in “Nowhere to Go but Up". Miss the dancing penguins? The parrot umbrella? Admiral Boom and Mr Binnacle? They’re all back.

It’s as if Disney is worried the adults who grew up with the 1964 film and are taking their kids to watch Mary Poppins Returns will turn into sullen fanboys if deprived of familiar pleasures or faced with a Hispanic-American leading man and a few black characters. And so it gives them spoons full of nostalgia to help the (minor) revisionism go down. Apart from Whishaw’s turn, the performances are variations on the ones that came before – unavoidable, considering Blunt is playing the same character as Julie Andrews did, and Miranda’s Jack is a facsimile of Van Dyke’s Bert. But they’re also winsome, especially when Blunt rolls her eyes or flashes her razorblade grin. The same goes for the music by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman’s lyrics – heavily indebted to the earlier film, but deft and effective.

Unlike the Paddington films, which are set in the present day, Marshall locates the action in pre-WWII London. The longing is not just for a more innocent time but for a simpler cinema, one where it’s not considered emotionally manipulative to have children sing their father out of depression. Over the next 15 months, remakes of Dumbo, Aladdin and Mulan will release. If you have memories of old Disney films, enjoy them while you can. They’ll soon be supercalifragilisticexpialidated.

This review appeared in Mint.

Simmba: Review

The year ends as it began, with an unhinged Ranveer Singh performance in a film that really needs it. While ‘Padmaavat’ (review) was built around his character’s reputation for corrupting virtue, ‘Simmba’ turns on his being moved to defend it. Spare a thought for the women in these films, whose excellent options are: burn yourself alive to preserve your honour from the marauding Alauddin Khilji, or be raped and brutalised so that Sangram Bhalerao might realise his true calling.

Before ‘Simmba’ turned, I found myself dangerously close to enjoying an entire half of a Rohit Shetty film. This is not a position I’m accustomed to finding myself in, and I blame Singh and his knowingly ludicrous performance. We first see “Simmba" Bhalerao in Shivgadh, chasing a couple of goons through a dhobi ghat. Even with the usual stop-start Shetty action, it’s a lovely sequence, brightly coloured clothes flapping and water splashing in slow motion as Simmba hands out beatings and wisecracks. Afterwards, the young cop cheerfully accepts bribes from the thieves and from the trader whose jewellery he’s recovered. It’s a part of the Singham universe, but the tiresome moral clouds of the Shetty-Ajay Devgn films are already receding.

Simmba is transferred to Miramar, Goa, a lucrative posting for a crooked officer. His first move is to seek out the local don, Durva (Sonu Sood), and promise not to interfere in his business. For a while, everything goes swimmingly, Simmba helping Durva bully people out of their property while turning a blind eye to his drug-running. He also finds time to fall for Shagun (Sara Ali Khan), a café owner who supplies lunch to the police station, and become de facto elder brother to Aakruti (Vaidehi Parshurami), a medical student who teaches underprivileged children.

If you’ve seen the film’s trailer, you know something horrible will happen to Aakruti. Part of the perverseness of Simmba is how much silly fun it is before this incident. Singh preens and pouts, mixes Hindi and Marathi and broken English. He has the ability to play a broad-chested hero and still seem like he’s in on the joke. When he shouts “Uff, taana" at a disapproving cop, or performs a jealous pantomime when Shagun appears interested in another man, the playacting is a level removed from the outright spoofery of Quick Gun Murugan (review). Like all Shetty characters, Simmba is a cardboard creation, but in Singh’s playing, his macho bluster has an underlying sweetness that renders it more winsome than the humourless masculinity of Devgn’s Singham.

The film quickly comes apart when a couple of Aakruti’s students go missing. Her search leads her to Durva’s drug-packing den, where she’s discovered by his brothers. They first try and take her phone; when she fights back, they assault and rape her. When Simmba visits her in hospital the next day, she’s barely alive. He vows revenge on Durva and his brothers, changes his corrupt ways, and that’s the rest of the film.

Even for Hindi cinema, where rape-revenge is a thriving subgenre (there were four films on the subject last year), this is pretty dire. Sexual assault is not just a plot device here, it’s the catalyst for Simmba to go from bad to good. Put more plainly, a minor female character has to suffer so that the male lead may evolve. For all its outrage over the safety of women, the film can’t help but reveal its obsession with male pride and how this is linked with the ‘honour’ of women they protect. Durva’s brothers are goaded in jail, called napunsak (impotent) and namard (unmanly), incapable of rape. There’s a lot of talk of ‘desh ki betiyaan’—daughters of the nation. Time and again, male characters are asked, how would you feel if this happened to your sister, your mother? One has to wonder whether Simmba would be this affected if the victim had been someone he didn’t know and not the girl he considered his sister.

The ridiculousness piles up as Shetty and writers Yunus Sajawal and Farhad Samji barrel headlong into an issue they seem to have no deep thoughts on. A courtroom scene has Simmba asking the judge, a woman, if one ‘desh ki beti’ can help out another. Later, a friend of Aakruti asks, “Desh ki betiyaan padh toh rahi hain par desh ki betiyon ko in haivanon se bachaega kaun (daughters of the nation are studying, but who will save them from these savages)?"—a twisting of the government’s “beti bachao, beti padhao" slogan, but to what end? The film’s idea of including women in the conversation about safety is, I guess, when Simmba asks a group which includes Aakruti’s mother and Shagun what they think should happen to rapists. Each responds with some variation on “they deserve to die". At least Shetty’s consistent: both ‘Singham’ (review) and ‘Singham Returns’ (review) ended with vigilante killings by the police.

Shagun is largely absent after the intermission; she’s extra baggage in a film that has more use for women as sisters and mothers than as lovers. Her best moment—and a rare instance of female agency—is when she tells Simmba that she likes him and demands to know whether he has feelings for her (that the cocky Simmba turns out to be a shy wooer is a nice character beat). But she’s clearly an afterthought—a few hastily written lines and a back story about a dead cop father that goes nowhere.

Singham turns up, which should surprise no one. To hear Devgn grunt his lines is to become grateful all over again for Singh’s fleet presence, even if it’s weighed down by the cartoon violence and endless posturing that make Shetty such a popular, if critically reviled, director. As a late scene makes clear, the Shetty-verse isn’t done growing. But more than expanded universes, what commercial Hindi cinema needs right now is broadened world views.

This review appeared in Mint.

Blind man’s bluff

In Indian cinema and abroad, the smartly designed trailer is an endangered species, replaced by mini-movies with most of the plot and all the best lines. This might explain the ecstatic reactions that greeted the Andhadhun trailer when it released earlier this month. To use a term that now means something else entirely, it’s a teaser, an enticement to discover a story in cinemas rather than have it all laid out beforehand.

Sriram Raghavan’s film is about a blind pianist (Ayushmann Khurrana) who is involved in the aftermath of a violent crime by a mysterious woman (Tabu). The twist hinted at in the trailer is that he’s surprisingly aware of his surroundings for a visually impaired person. Andhadun appears to be a darkly humorous noir film—territory that Raghavan has made his own with films like Ek Hasina Thi, Johnny Gaddaar and Badlapur (the outlier is the spy thriller Agent Vinod). He spoke to Lounge about writing as a team and how a 44-day shoot took a whole year. Edited excerpts:

A blind pianist turns up in another of your films, during the ‘Raabta’ musical number/shootout in ‘Agent Vinod’.
She was one of the minor inspirations of this kind of character. Lots of people asked me then, how does she not know what’s going on, is she deaf also? I said, maybe, maybe not. But yes, another character who either can see, or not...

The trailer has echoes of Francois Truffaut’s ‘Shoot The Piano Player’: a pianist involved with two women and dragged into a crime, the melding of noir and comedy and gangster genres. Was it an influence?
Shoot The Piano Player is one of my favourite films, though apparently it failed very badly when it released. I discovered Truffaut once I joined the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). But Shoot The Piano Player wasn’t available in the archives, so I saw it much later, once the DVD had come out.

This movie actually has nothing to do with Shoot The Piano Player—all the echoes you mention are purely coincidental. But while making the film, there’s one shot during which I’d said, “Oh this is a Shoot The Piano Player shot, we must do it."

There was one thing Truffaut had said after making The 400 Blows—something like, “This is an explosion of genres". Like what you said, comedy and drama and tragedy. I used to think, all Hindi movies are explosions of genres in that sense.

How did you decide how much gets revealed in the trailer?
I had a tough time passing any trailer. I kept saying, you can’t show this, you can’t show that. We let it go finally because it had to go.

I think we’ve gotten overexplicit. For thrillers, it’s especially difficult to carve out a good trailer. When we were trying to do this one, I was watching a lot of trailers for movies like The Sixth Sense, to see what they were giving away. There was one that I saw—I used to show it to the team and say, watch and learn. It was a trailer of Psycho, just (Alfred) Hitchcock talking to the camera in that house and one shot of the movie. It’s almost a 6-minute trailer but it’s effective.

What gave you the initial idea for ‘Andhadhun’?
There’s a short film I’d seen in 2013 or 2014— a friend of mine sent it to me. This was before Badlapur even came into process. What I’ve done is nothing to do with that film, but it was my basic germ.

Me and this guy called Hemant Rao started spitballing on it. Then at some point I got into Badlapur, so our interactions became a little infrequent. Then he started his own movie. Once Badlapur got over, I had the gist of the story, but we hadn’t scripted it entirely. I was about to start this but then I read about Kaabil (a 2017 film in which Hrithik Roshan plays a blind man). It would be a bit crazy to have two movies about visually impaired people, so I stopped.

You had a number of writers on this project.
It was me and Arijit (Biswas) and Pooja (Ladha Surti) and a fresh boy, Yogesh Chandekar. It’s very organic. I figure out the basic story. Then Arijit and me will chat about it, he’ll have some ideas. Pooja is great as a sounding board. We just sit and discuss the possible movie. It’s over a few afternoons and evenings spread over three or four months—we’ve never tried sitting for 10 days and doing it in a go.

Do you all write dialogue?
Yeah. Arijit writes in English. I also think in English. But then you keep getting disappointed when you’re translating from English to Hindi. For the dramatic scenes, I told Arijit to write in Bengali, which is at least the Indian idiom. Most languages in India, you can get a sense of what’s being said from the way we speak it.

Pooja’s Hindi is much better than ours, so we make her write a version. Then the actors pitch in. What you see in my script may not be what’s in the film. Sometimes it’s a very scary thing, when I have to shoot in the morning and the scene’s not good enough, and it’s only me there, and there’s no signal to even call the others and say, think of a better line.

How long did the shoot take?
It was a 44-day shoot, but these 44 days happened over almost a year. My director of photography (K.U. Mohanan) is a busy guy, Tabu was doing Golmaal and suddenly Radhika (Apte) got a whole lot of international projects and Sacred Games. I had to see, can I get them for two days, for five days? And Ayushmann was doing Badhaai Ho, in which he didn’t have a beard. It was crazy. I began in June last year, and 17 July this year was my last day.

Were there any particular tonal inspirations?
One of the big conscious or subconscious inspirations is Fargo, both the series and the Coen brothers’ movie. It’s realistic and yet it’s bizarre.

Having Anil Dhawan, an actor from the 1970s, play Tabu’s husband is an unusual casting choice.
Until the final casting was done, we were tossing up names. One option was taking a character actor and modelling him as an old-style star, like Naseer (Naseeruddin Shah) in Dirty Picture. But the only thing was, if I did that and then wanted to have some fun with an old clip, it’ll look quite grotesque. Then this thought of let’s take an actual person arose. I knew (actor) Varun and (director) David Dhawan, and Anil is David’s older brother. I met him, and he loved the idea.