At the scene of the crime

My Mirror column.

Watching Kahaani 2 triggers a retrospective look at the city’s role in Vidya Balan’s actorly career.

Vidya Balan as an urban working mother in Kahaani 2

The new Kahaani 2 is nowhere near as good as 2012's Kahaani: its mystery is less mystifying, its cops are less attractive, its villains are caricatures who fail to chill. The plot is not a continuation of Kahaani's, and nor do the two films have any characters in common.

There, now, that's out of the way, we can get on to the real business of this column — which is to try and understand what Vidya Balan is trying to do with her star persona. I can hear the surprised reaction already: “But Vidya Balan isn't a star. She's an actor.”

I agree. Balan is indeed one of the few A-list female stars in Mumbai who does not seem to care at all about appearances — by which I mean not that she isn't good-looking, but that she isn't always striving to look her best. In fact, as I wrote in a 2014 op-ed, “Balan is one of the rare Mumbai heroines who enjoys that most basic element of acting: becoming someone else.”

Roles like ones she held in The Dirty Picture (in which Balan played the Southern sex star Silk Smitha with rare physical ease) or the hilarious, sadly underwatched Ghanchakkar (where she appeared to revel in the OTT outfits worn by her fashion-addicted housewife character) would seem to suggest that the actor's plan is to not have a plan.

And yet, since watching Kahaani 2, I have begun to see a distinct pattern in Balan's cinematic appearances. There is a kinship among many of her recent characters that can only be explained as the slow, perhaps organic — and perhaps inevitable — crafting of a star persona.

For one, Balan — in conjunction with her directors, most energetically Sujoy Ghosh, but also Ribhu Dasgupta and Samar Sheikh — seems to have taken it upon herself to craft for the Hindi film heroine a new relationship with the Indian city. (The cities chosen for this project so far are interesting, too: Calcutta in Kahaani, Te3n and Kahaani 2, and Hyderabad in Bobby Jasoos.) Again and again, Balan plays female protagonists who get to traverse the streets of Indian cities with an abandon that is rare in real life — and practically unseen on screen.

Second, unlike the many mainstream heroines whose on-screen explorations in urban space are limited by class and the protective company of men, Balan's indefatigable female characters walk the city alone, and with purpose. What is fascinating is how frequently this purpose involves a crime.

Vidya Balan tracks her sister's killers in No One Killed Jessica (2011)

As far back as Raj Kumar Gupta's No One Killed Jessica (2011), as Sabrina, the sister of murdered real-life model Jessica Lal, we saw Balan slice fiercely through Delhi's fog of fakery, crisscrossing that city's party venues and police stations in search of an elusive justice. As the marvellous Vidya Venkatesan Bagchi in 2012's Kahaani, she pounds through the streets of Calcutta on a mission to find her missing husband, her pregnant belly both attracting attention and deflecting it. With that wonderful double-edged mechanism in place, “Bid-da Bagchi” — as the movie's Bongs pronounced her name — runs riot, using her ingenuity to open doors across the length and breadth of the city, from seedy hotels to government offices, Park Street to Kumartuli.

From the grieving family member who finds herself on a mission against the city's obfuscations, it was a short step to playing a professional solver of urban mysteries. In Bobby Jasoos (2014), Balan enjoyed herself thoroughly, playing a roza-keeping Hyderabadi women whose uber-enthusiasm for her job as a newbie detective also involves a series of disguises: turbans and moustaches, false bosoms, Kanjeevarams and burqas all treated with the same nonchalant panache.

Vidya Balan as a cop on a case, in Te3n (2016)

In Te3n, produced by Sujoy Ghosh, which came out earlier this year, she graduated to becoming an investigator in uniform. Although she landed with the film's least fleshed-out part, Balan's turn as Sarita — the policewoman handling the kidnapping case on which Te3n turns — certainly added to her particular actorly repertoire as that rare Indian woman who traverses the city with ease, so comfortable in her own skin as to seem to our unfamiliar eyes almost belligerent.

From Poe and Conan Doyle, until the present day, the idea of the detective as an urban explorer and guide has run parallel to the idea of the city as a site of criminal imagination. So it was likely only a matter of time before Vidya's urban trajectories turned full circle: from unravelling the city's secrets as an investigator of crime, to becoming the investigated. Kahaani 2, in fact, allows us glimpses of three of these female flaneur selves: the do-gooder urban detective, the heroic everywoman and the potential criminal mastermind. Sadly, Balan's age-old good-girl persona (think Parineeta, Lage Raho Munnabhai, Jessica) prevents her Kahaani 2 character's potential doubleedged-ness from being convincing.

Maybe we need another Ishqiya to bring her dark-black mojo back.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 Dec 2016.

The Salt of Time

My Mirror column:

If you can ignore the gimmicky title, Te3n's Calcutta offers both an atmospheric whodunit and an affecting take on ageing. 

There is plenty to be said about the plot of Te3n, but Ribhu Dasgupta's seond directorial venture is tense and surprising enough for me to want to keep its secrets. Suffice it to say that it tackles a subject that is beloved of thrillers and whodunits, perhaps because it is every parent's worst nightmare—the kidnapping and death of a child. An authorised remake of the 2013 Korean film Montage, the film is about the kidnapping of a little boy in the present which ends up re-opening an unsolved case from the past, and gives a guilt-ridden policeman a chance to redeem himself for previous failures. But while the Korean original directed the bulk of the audience's sympathies to the dead child's mother, the Hindi version gives emotional centre-stage to her grandfather. 

That grandfather—a once-tall man now hunched over with the twin burdens of age and sorrow—is played by Amitabh Bachchan. Much of the emotive power of the film lies in watching this man, who once strode across our screens like a colossus, transform himself into something old and frail and vulnerable. From the very first scene, in which we see him uncomfortably positioned on a wooden bench in the police station, the fatigue of long years of waiting is visible not just in his sunken cheeks, but in his gaunt frame. Bachchan's delivery, especially in the film's early and final scenes, contains too much of his star self, but his body language manages to convince us that he is that all-too-frequently seen by-product of India's non-working systems: a broken old man. 

There is, of course, an occasional glimmer of the old tenaciousness, even arrogance—and Dasgupta milks this when he can, such as the withering glance Bachchan gives a low-life who settles into the bench next to him, forcing him to make room—or the caustic comeuppance he delivers to Nawazuddin Siddiqui's policeman-turned-priest Martin for having turned his back on a case he failed to solve: "Tumhari tarah situation se bhaagna wala nahi hoon main." None of this evidence of spirit, however, prevents us from experiencing an almost bodily fear for the old man's safety as he traverses the city on his rickety old blue scooter, following up obscure new clues that no-one in the police force will give the time of day. (That projection of vulnerability shares something with Vidya Balan's pregnant heroine in Kahaani, a previous Calcutta-set thriller directed in 2012 by Sujoy Ghosh, who is producer here.) 

It seems to me no coincidence that Dasgupta chooses to set his film in Calcutta, nor that the character he places at the centre of this crumbling, once-grand city is a crumbling, once-grand man. But much like the Calcutta of which he is an embodiment, Bachchan's ageing John Biswas is down but not out. He still does his baajaar like a good Bengali man, and even steps in to cook and clean in lieu of his wheelchair-bound wife. He may walk slowly and climb gingerly, but he is both intrepid and dogged in his conquest of the obstacle race the city presents as its ordinary face. In Calcutta, Te3n suggests, even violent crime and the sharp-edged investigation of it must tangle with petty bureaucratic tyrannies. The slow deliberation that is required as a response is what Dasgupta uses to set the pace of his film. 

And though the star roles are handed to three Bombay-based talents—Bachchan and Siddiqui are joined by Balan's over-confident police officer Sarita—the filmmakers do pay atmospheric tribute to Calcutta. The daylight scenes are full of bright whites and blues, while greens and yellows dominate the dimly-lit night sequences. There is some gratuitious use of Calcutta cliches—Durga Puja and Howrah Bridge, hand-pulled rickshaws in the background and too-empty ferries in the foreground, and Clinton Cerejo's faux-Baul song annoyed me particularly. The homes we see, all located on a continuum between the romantic and the shabby, appear a little too artful. But that slight quality of excess seems right when it comes to the tubelit government office and the dilapidated rail yard, the deafening rhythms of the printing press and the plodding low rumble of the trams. The large white expanse of St. Paul's Cathedral contrasts interestingly with the more threadbare feel of the Hooghly Imambara (and though this predominance of religious spaces seems of a piece with the story's focus on death and redemption and justice, the film's primary characters being Christian seemed odd: I wondered if it was strategic, giving an audience that doesn't know better a supposed reason for these Calcuttans being Hindi-speaking.) 

What the film affords the viewer is an experience that often feels particular to Calcutta: that of peering through wooden slatted windows or creaky doors left slightly ajar, to look at those hidden places the city hugs to itself, like secrets guarded more zealously as one grows older. The city's new colours do make an occasional appearance— such as an exciting chase scene aboard the brightly patterned Duronto trains. But when events as recent as 2007 are shown to contain cassette players, one wonders if the filmmakers are insisting on ageing the city before its time.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 11 June 2016.

The reality of illusions

Yesterday's Mumbai Mirror column:

How can a performance ever be honest, and other thoughts about acting via Nawazuddin Siddiqui.

Acting seems to me one of the most mysterious things in the world. Everyone who's watching knows they're watching someone simulate something. And yet we watch precisely to make ourselves believe in the truth of the performance. There are, of course, as many different kinds of acting as there are kinds of cinema and theatre. In popular Hindi cinema in particular, stardom depends on the ability to produce endless variations on a persona that has already met with approval. Those variations can be riffs on a central theme, but the persona needs to remain recognisable. Our relationships with the stars on screen are profoundly mediated by our relationships with their off-screen personas.

But outside of the pleasures of watching our favourite stars ham, repeat recognizable gestures, and generally entertain us, even Hindi film viewers these days seem to have come round to appreciating 'realist' acting. Though the appreciation of 'realism' comes up against another sort of problem: if acting is visible, it's bad acting - and if it's invisible, it's too ineffable to describe. If you can see it, it isn't working; if it works, you can't really see it. So how do we talk about acting?

Someone who has been a transformative presence in this recent phase of Hindi cinema, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, is often asked about acting. An interviewer asked about how the acting bug bit him. He said he had grown up in a religious, rural Muslim milieu where films were frowned upon, and anyway the nearest cinema was 45km away. So as a child there was no question of dreaming of being an actor.

It was much later, when a friend in Delhi took him to a play, that he realised he wanted to act. After that play (Uljhan, with Manoj Bajpayee in it), he watched some 50 plays, and then joined a theatre troupe. And later, the National School of Drama.

What fascinated me was not so much the story of Siddiqui's moment of recognition - though there is something inescapably dramatic about it coming from the first play he had ever seen. What struck me was the reason he gave for why acting appealed to him. Here, he thought, was a profession in which sifaarish (recommendations) or flattery couldn't help you. When you appeared on stage, it would become immediately apparent if you were good or not -- the tomatoes would start to fly if you were not.

What Siddiqui said, in other words, is that acting appealed to him because it was the most honest thing he could do. The direct encounter with a paying audience represented, in the actor's mind, liberation from the inherent artifice of life. But of course as Siddiqui himself found out soon enough, the paying audience does not guarantee the purity of performance that the actor might strive for. It came as a shock to me that during and after NSD, Siddiqui was typecast as a comedian.

He did comedy, he says, in many styles - he did slapstick and he did Moliere, he did grandiose Parsi-style theatricals - but he was largely stuck being the funny guy.

When he upped and moved to Bombay, he found it hard to get any work at all, because he was neither well-connected nor endowed with the gora-chitta good looks that Bollywood demands. As is now well-known, Siddiqui struggled for nearly four years, doing some work in television in true crime shows, while in cinema he got either no work or tiny single scenes in films like Sarfarosh.

When he did start to get mainstream attention, a little bit after Peepli Live and Black Friday, but on a big scale after Kahani and Gangs of Wasseypur (GoW), it was "intense" roles. Siddiqui denies that there is anything in him that is particularly drawn to angry, serious characters.

But in an industry so unused to allowing actors range, the relationship between the self and the screen persona plagues even actors like Siddiqui. And it is not always simple. Recently he has made a bit of a splash with Kick, about which he has said only half-jokingly that his mother is thrilled because he has finally fulfilled her desire to see him as a rich man.

About his GoW role, one of the most interesting things Siddiqui said was that he was thrilled not to be the small time thug getting beaten up, again. "I wanted status-wala role, where I would do the hitting. I had never expressed this wish, this desire to anybody. But [Kashyap] made it happen for me."

On Siddiqui's first day shooting GoW, Kashyap was surprised that he "was very aggressive". "He thought this is the first time he is doing a film where he was the hero so he came on as the hero." It was Kashyap who insisted he tone it down.

Siddiqui has often said that the only way to act "truthfully" is to draw upon an inner part of yourself that's similar to the character you have been called upon to play. But sometimes a character is what you always wanted to be in real life -- and you end up overplaying your part.

Woman, Uninterrupted

Today's Mumbai Mirror column:

Vidya Balan's free-spirited performances have opened up a space in our cinema where not just she, but other women, too, might begin to be comfortable in their skin.

In most Indian cities, it is still a rare joy to see a woman out and about on her own terms: walking, working, eating -- just being; a woman who sits comfortably in her skin, not 'adjusting' by squeezing into the smallest possible space simply because the men on either side have spread themselves out, as men do. 

And for me, at least, that joy is amplified when that woman isn't obsessively chronicling her every look, her every laugh and eyebrow twitch in some imagined mirror that is a man's face. 

Within the world of Hindi cinema, Vidya Balan is that woman. And in Bobby Jasoos, you see Balan do again what our film industry, like our public spaces, rarely let its women do: take the centre seat, settle in, and thoroughly enjoy herself. 

After the slow drying-up of Priyanka Chopra's A-for-Ambition appearances (Fashion, What's Your Rashi, Saat Khoon Maaf) -- and up until Kangana Ranaut's Queen (and the disappointing but risk-taking Revolver Rani) -- Balan has been the only heroine with commercial billing to test the Lakshman Rekhas the industry draws around its female actors. 

Having bid a loud and lusty goodbye to her good-girl reputation with Ishqiya and The Dirty Picture, she went on to carry a thriller like Kahaani entirely on her shoulders. 

After some years of grief, Balan has also figured out that her performances are enough to soar above the low-level depredations of the KJo-led fashion police. That liberation from starry compulsions translates into Balan's roles as well - can you think of anyone else in contemporary Bollywood who wouldn't have balked at doing a whole film with a big pregnant belly? Or embraced Silk Smitha's larger-than-life physically, literally spilling out of her clothes, with such joyous lack of inhibition? Or jumped with such gusto into the atrociously loud outfits of fashion-magazine-obsessed Neetu in Ghanchakkar? 

Balan is one of the rare Mumbai heroines who enjoys that most basic element of acting: becoming someone else. And in Bobby Jasoos, she gets to do it in the most enjoyable way possible. As an intrepid, if somewhat inept female detective, Balan's Bobby gets to walk the crowded alleys of Hyderabad's Mughalpura as everything from a turban-wearing beggar man to a young bangle seller with a wispy moustache. Balan looks like she's having as much of a good time as Bobby is meant to -- and I certainly revelled in watching Bobby, disguised as a large Kanjeevaram-clad mami with an impressive shelf of a bosom, suddenly start jumping with joy upon receiving her largest payment cheque ever. 

But it isn't just playing dress-up. For most Indian women, the idea of being able to melt invisibly into the -- inevitably male -- crowd is a pervasive fantasy. Bobby Jasoos taps into that often unarticulated yearning by having its heroine achieve, in multiple forms of masquerade, the freedom she might not have otherwise. 

By making Bobby a roza-keeping Muslim woman who's never without her dupatta, the film aims for a social realism of sorts. This is a conservative lower middle class milieu, in which a woman who hasn't married and borne children by thirty is beyond the pale, and a man having a serious chat with his son sends his wife -- who's massaging his head -- into another room. It is no surprise that Bobby's father can only respond to the gift of his daughter's first salary with the pronouncement that "This household doesn't run on women's earnings." 

Yet when Bobby wears a burqa, it is only as another form of disguise. Her usual uniform is a loose salwar-kameez, her hair escaping an untidy plait and a packet of Parle-G biscuits peeping out of her satchel. Her workaday look is also a reflection of her priorities: we have here a woman whose response to having the car door opened for her by a personable young man is to say caustically, "Mereko aata hai gaadi ka darwaza kholna". Bobby is the elder sister who, when she needs to enter a five star hotel on assignment, gets one of her more feminine younger sisters to do her make-up. 

And yet, even while Bobby (and it's important that she insists on being called that, instead of the more feminine Bilqees) does largely what she wants, she continues to crave approval from her father (and in an interesting mirroring, from the life-changing older man who becomes her mystery client). 

The other remarkable thing about Bobby's character is that she's too busy working to bother chasing men -- and when love does appear, it is gentle and unbombastic. 

Especially for a film that returns us, after an aeon, to an all-Muslim milieu, Bobby Jasoos almost makes no concessions to romantic nazakat Muslim Social style. In fact, it sustains its tenor of comic mystery quite remarkably: if there's any gazing at feet in this movie, it's to look for a man with a missing toe. 

With Bobby Jasoos, Balan gives us a reel-life heroine who's neither a doormat nor a head-tossing rebel without a cause. She'd be a treasure even in the real world.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

She Belongs to the City

An op-ed I wrote for the Indian Express, on Kahaani and women in the contemporary Hindi cinema city.

Kahaani, the Vidya Balan-starring thriller which released just over a week ago, may or may not be full of unforgivable plot holes, but is being applauded pretty much across the board for having brought to the screen an Indian city that looks and feels real. Partly, of course, this is simply to do with the fact that the city in question is Kolkata, a place where so much living takes place in public that it cannot but be cinematic.

The visual pleasures of Calcutta (as it was then) were once afforded us not just by Bangla cinema, but by many Hindi films, too: think of Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa, Shakti Samanta’s Chinatown, Sombhu Mitra’s Jaagte Raho or the immensely enjoyable 1959 noir Howrah Bridge (with that terrific song, “Kahin Mukherjee kahin Banerjee, kahin Ghosh kahin Datta hai, Suno ji yeh Kalkatta hai”). These days, though, the few filmmakers for whom the texture of the urban experience is important — Ram Gopal Varma, Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee, Raj Kumar Gupta, Habib Faisal, Maneesh Sharma — focus on Bombay/ Mumbai, the uncrowned First City of Hindi cinema, and increasingly, Delhi.

But more than its loving, detailed embrace of all that makes Kolkata distinctive, from musty government offices to the old-world charm of Park Street restaurants, what makes Kahaani truly remarkable (and it is surprising that so few people have remarked on it, even when going on about Vidya Balan — a heroine! — carrying the film on her shoulders), is that this is a city film with a woman at its centre. For the female Hindi film viewer, there is much joy to be derived simply from watching a woman walking the streets of an Indian city, often alone — and doing so with pleasure.

To be sure, Vidya Bagchi’s wanderings are not quite the pleasurably aimless saunterings of a flaneur — that attractive Baudelairian-Benjaminian creature, the gentleman stroller of 19th century Paris whose only reason to walk the city is to experience it, has remained to this day irredeemably male. Kahaani’s heroine, like almost every woman in an Indian city, has a good reason to be out and about. Her reason is so elemental, in fact — searching for her missing husband, the father of her unborn child — that her journey might have been shot as a mission. Yet, remarkably, Sujoy Ghosh’s film manages to keep alive a sense of the city as a space that isn’t just something that a woman must negotiate, circumvent, battle with — but might actually savour.

This is so rare an achievement as to be spectacular. To set it in context: any wandering through cities by women in contemporary Hindi movies is one of two types. The first is in foreign locales, where such wanderings are deemed safe, and good upper middle class Indian girls can thus liberate unhappy boys: refer to Katrina Kaif’s carpe diem diving instructor in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, teaching Hrithik Roshan’s uptight banker how to truly live (through holidays in Spain), or Kareena Kapoor in Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, speeding through Los Angeles (and life) on a pink electric scooty in a happy haze that couldn’t be more different from Imran Khan’s unhappy plodding. The second type of girl-in-the-city scenario is a spree that takes place before arranged marriage to a suitable boy. Here the safety of the wild-child heroine is ensured by her being in the company of a man (usually the boy-we-know-she’s-actually-falling-in-love-with) — think Nargis Fakhri in Rockstar, giggling through a “morning show” with her Jatboy BFF Ranbir Kapoor, or Katrina in Mere Brother ki Dulhan knocking back beers with Imran the night before she marries his brother.

Of course, there are exceptions to this typology — No One Killed Jessica (Vidya Balan again, criss-crossing Delhi to get justice for her murdered sister), The Girl in Yellow Boots (Kalki Koechlin traversing seedy city underbelly, but she’s British and psychologically damaged) and Delhi Belly where Poorna Jagannathan plays a journalist caught up in a crazy urban adventure.

But rarely, if ever, have we had a protagonist like Vidya Bagchi, a woman who travels alone to a new city and takes it as her right that she should be able to stay as long as she likes, alone and unharassed, in a cheap hotel. Whether she is drinking tea at a street stall, or haunting a particular police station until they respond to her request for help, she is neither setting out to be radical, nor on some temporary joyride. She is simply doing what all women, everywhere, ought to be able to do — but so rarely feel confident enough to. In a country in which a spate of rapes only spurs the administration to suggest curfews for women, a film like Kahaani feels like a collective dream — the unvoiced dream all women have, in which the city might belong to us as much as it does to men.

Trisha Gupta is a Delhi-based writer and anthropologist.

Film review: Kahaani

Kahaani is an absolutely remarkable film for three reasons. First, it is the tautest, most involving thriller to have come out of Hindi cinema in years. Second, it is a stunningly shot city film, made inestimably more memorable by the simple move of stepping out of supremely overused Mumbai streets and increasingly familiar Delhi locations into a startlingly cinematic Kolkata. And third, it contains another bravura performance from the marvellous Vidya Balan, stepping back into the arc lights, even as the thunderous applause for The Dirty Picture continues to ring in her ears (and ours).

As Vidya Venkatesan Bagchi, a woman who arrives in Kolkata distressed and seven months pregnant, to search for a husband who has gone missing, Balan demonstrates yet again how immense the possibilities are for a talented actress who can get beyond the Bollywood preoccupation with looking glamorous on screen. Just as she filled out Silk’s ample curves with ease, giving us a glimpse of a sexuality that is joyous, libidinal and free, Balan in Kahaani embraces with grace and fullness the traditionally kept-out-of-sight body of the heavily pregnant woman.

The pregnant female body has always been in plain view, but I cannot think of another instance when it has been so unapologetically present, at least on the Hindi film screen, as it is in Kahaani. As a recent piece in Open magazine points out, Sujoy Ghosh has been preoccupied with the transformative power of motherhood for quite some time. His first film, the light and breezy Jhankaar Beats (2003), was a more or less all-boys film but featured a pregnant Juhi Chawla as the calming, strong presence in a rather confused male universe.

In Kahaani, Ghosh’s fourth film, the pregnant woman is positioned at the very core of his narrative, drawing in full measure on all the possible contradictory associations which that figure radiates in our minds: an incontrovertible sexuality, but tied to an almost sacred image of fertility; immense strength but also vulnerability – a figure who is disarming because everyone feels obliged to keep her out of harm’s way. As one character puts it in the film, “Ek pregnant aurat se kisi ko dar nahi lagta, especially jiska husband chala gaya ho”.

Ghosh marshalls this combination of an unthreatening presence and innate confidence adeptly, making his female protagonist walk fearlessly through the streets of a strange city, driven by a desire so elemental as to make her seem invincible – to find the father of her unborn child.

The city itself is expertly shot by Satyajit Pandey, using the outsider’s eye of Balan’s character to capture Kolkata in all its multi-layered glory: from tawdry “zero star” guesthouses where the reception man can only guffaw at the idea of a computerised guest record to the immaculate old-fashioned charm of Park Street’s loveliest ‘continental’ restaurants. But what is truly remarkable is the effect that Ghosh and Pandey – and their clearly consummate editor Namrata Rao (Band Baaja Baraat, Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, Ishqiya) – have managed to achieve: to take the throbbing pulse of Kolkata’s everyday life and make of it a ticking time bomb. Whether we are wandering through the crumbling, run-down lanes of North Kolkata, past the near-touristy sight of Kumartuli’s sculptors creating their clay images of the goddess Durga, or entering the mad Puja festivities full of beating dhaks and ululating women, the city feels unerringly real and yet filled with menace.

The unpredictable feel of the film is aided greatly by Ghosh’s refusal to peddle stereotypes. The sharp young cop is genuinely a nice guy (played by the very talented Bengali actor Parambrata Chatterjee). The plot is “about terrorism” but features no Muslims and more or less indicts the Indian state. The chilling hitman has a day job as an overweight government insurance employee (played with consummate precision by another wonderful Bengali actor, Saswata Mukherjee). We even have a woman who is a virtuoso computer expert, but the treatment of the character is so nuanced that it feels aeons away from the wannabe hacker-heroines of films like Abbas-Mustan’s Players (As in Sonam, of “Maine ethical hacking mein Master’s kiya hai” fame).

The film’s pace and characterisations are so flawless that it is hard even for a Bangla-speaker to grudge Ghosh the almost exclusive use of Hindi in what is essentially a film about a polyglot city. For the first fifteen minutes or so, my ear ached to hear much of the dialogue in Bangla instead of Hindi. But the Bengali actors, speaking Hindi in their own unique way, but without drawing unnecessary attention to their Bengali accents, ensure that the film never feels unnatural. The narrative also displays an occasional but sharply observed interest in Bengali peculiarities such as the necessity of daaknaam (nicknames), even employing it in the service of the plot. Barring Amitabh Bachchan’s tragically wrong pronuncation in the Ekla Cholo song at the end, I had no complaints as someone raised in Kolkata.

Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani proves that it is possible to make a Hindi film that is racy as well as thought-provoking, that steps bravely off the well-trodden path with both the heroine and the city at its centre, and that keeps you glued to your seat with no sex or romance as traditionally understood — and only the slightest smidgeon of blood. Bravo.

Published in Firstpost.