My Mirror column:
The absorbing Raat Akeli Hai stars
Nawazuddin Siddiqui as a UP cop learning a little about himself as he
unravels a web of murderous intrigue
 |
| Radhika Apte in a still from the atmospheric new murder mystery Raat Akeli Hai |
The shaadi ka ghar has been a
favoured backdrop for the dramatic unfolding of countless Hindi film romances,
but it’s likely never been the setting for a murder mystery. Nor has the
ubiquitous wedding video been turned into evidence for a police investigation
before. Honey Trehan’s slow-burn directorial debut Raat Akeli Hai does both things with delicious conviction, giving
us an atmospheric whodunit that feels deeply embedded in the dystopic state of
Uttar Pradesh. What makes the film even more satisfying is that Trehan – a
long-time casting director who has done films with Vishal Bhardwaj, Meghna
Gulzar and Abhishek Chaubey – casts Nawazuddin Siddiqui as his detective hero,
and places his unmarriedness centrestage.
Saddled with the near-giggleworthy name of Jatil (literally ‘complex’)
Yadav, Siddiqui’s plain-speaking Kanpuriya cop is introduced
as a man with some complexes of his own. We first set eyes on him in a
photograph that his mother (the effortlessly watchable Ila Arun) is trotting
out at a wedding, attempting to
convince a female guest that her son is an eligible match. The
fair-skinned young woman has her spangly sari draped over a spaghetti strap
blouse, but her views on skin colour remain hopelessly unreconstructed. “Rang saaf nahi hai (His complexion isn't clear),” she says,
dismissing Jatil at a glance. “Par mann saaf hai (But his heart is),” says Arun, turning
away only to be accosted by her embarrassed and angry son.
But while we might sympathise with the fact that Jatil’s dark skin
makes him an inferior candidate in a world where Ajay Devgn is the
exception that proves the rule, his own views on
women reveal a rather muddy mann. “Did you see the clothes she
was wearing?” he says to his mother. “I just want a susheel girl.” As the film unfolds, however, Jatil’s
socially-learned disgust for the sexually independent woman (“Tumhare jaisi
aurat ko apne paas phatakne bhi na dein”) clashes often with his
simultaneous attraction to what he acknowledges as courage and honesty.
And no wonder, given the rarity of a “saaf mann” in RAH's
grim world. In a scenario with several shades of last year’s Hollywood crime
comedy Knives Out, Jatil is called upon to investigate the murder
of the patriarch of a well-off family whose members seem not to like each other
very much, and who might all have had motives to kill him. Knives Out hid
its sharp politics under parodic excess. Here Trehan and cinematographer Pankaj
Kumar (Haider, Tumbadd) create a brilliantly atmospheric web of
oppressive rooms and half-lit corridors to match a much darker milieu that
feels true to present-day North India: corrupt, power-hungry, sexually
exploitative and two-faced. When our hero gets there, the terrace and balconies
are still lit up for the wedding that has just taken place, of the widowed dead
man to his much younger mistress. And the sight of the new wife Radha (Radhika
Apte, looking the part but never completely inhabiting it), still in her
wedding finery, sitting in her upstairs room with a ghunghat half covering her
face, is very much part of the filmi marriage fantasy (from Mother India to
Kabhi Kabhie to Tanu Weds Manu) that RAH both evokes and toys
with.
What Trehan and his exceptional screenwriter Smita Singh do with elan is
to make that image of the marriageable woman the film's recurring subtext. The
dogged small-town detective whose Achilles’ Heel is attractive women has been
with us at least since Polanski’s Chinatown. Here the
mirage-like quality of Siddiqui’s first sight of Radha also reminds one
of Manorama Six Feet Under, Navdeep Singh’s 2007 adaptation of
Chinatown. But while our cop hero may have a soft spot for the supposed femme
fatale, almost everyone else (in the family and beyond) has already decided
that she must be the murderess. “Woh ladies rijha rahi hai
aapko (She's seducing you),” Siddiqui's colleague says knowingly.
When Siddiqui protests that she barely gives him the time of day, the colleague
pounces on him with the sort of unsustainable circular logic that otherwise
rational men single women out for: “That's exactly it! That's how women seduce
you, by not giving you attention.”
The slow accretion of words and images creates a dark picture of this
skewed world, in which women are damned if they don't – and certainly damned if
they do. From Siddiqui's “duffer” colleague to the dead man's feckless but good
looking “hero-type” heir, every man in town is out to make a sanskaari match,
while secretly lusting after women whose attraction is precisely that they're
not 'wife material'. “Baazaaru se gharelu hone ka safar kitna kathin hai aapko
maloom hai?” asks the politician Munna Raja (Aditya Srivastava). And yet the
gharelu women, who've won the supposed big prize of marriage and
respectability, can end up more patriarchal than the men, resorting to
ever-lower measures to guard their practically nonexistent turf.
Faced with this intriguing cocktail of lust and revenge, our UP
policeman hero presents himself as “not such a low-level man”. Jatil's striving
for moral fibre is real, and yet it is also clear that he must operate within
the system as it currently exists. And that system is one where the extra-legal
has become the norm, where it is a public secret that only a saffron-hued MLA
can risk owning a tannery, and an inconvenient cop is as easily 'encountered'
as an out-of-favour gangster. In this post-procedure world, even being a
stickler for truth can now mean finding extra-legal ways to uncover it. Whether it's marriage or murder, the show must go on.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 Aug 2020.
No comments:
Post a Comment