Below the Belt

My Mirror column:

It might not always succeed, but Abhinay Deo’s Blackmail is an ambitious comedy with a pretty dark view of the world we live in.

With Blackmail, director Abhinay Deo returns after a longish interval to the comic territory he made so volubly his own with Delhi Belly (2011). Although it deals with the ‘mature’ topic of marital infidelity rather than a screwed-up diamond heist, Blackmail makes clear that the more puerile of Deo’s preoccupations are alive and well. Shit doesn’t have quite the starring role it did in Delhi Belly, but there are enough potty jokes woven in to make sure we recognise the hand of the auteur. Sometimes literally, as when Deo manages to weave the phrase “the touch of the hand” into a silly scatological subplot. Blackmail’s central protagonist Dev (Irrfan Khan) works in a toilet paper company headed by a ridiculous boss (Omi Vaidya), who is evangelical about trying to wean Indians from water for their ablutions. This also successfully incorporates what seems to be another of Deo’s pet themes: water shortage. (Remember the boys sleeping through their municipal water timings in Delhi Belly?)

Stuck between a dead-end job and a dead marriage, Irrfan’s Dev leads a life of unvarying routine – breakfast consumed to the dull thud of pending EMIs, late nights in the office to the automated ping of video games, and then plodding back home to a solitary dinner left on the table by his disinterested wife Reena (Kirti Kulhari). The one time Dev decides to vary his behaviour, arriving home early with a bunch of roses, he stumbles onto a secret he’d rather not have known. His wife has a lover: Arunoday Singh in what might be his best role ever, as the red trackpant-wearing, clever-but-foolish Ranjit.

As with Delhi Belly, the tone Deo is aiming for is not realistic but blackly surreal. That surreality is most vivid when translated from the subconscious space of the hero’s mind onto the screen. So for instance, as he peers at Reena and Ranjit through a crack in the wall, Dev imagines — for a few satisfying seconds — thrusting the fruit knife into Ranjit’s buff, muscular back. Then the pleasurable fantasy recedes, and instead he gathers up the flowers and his jacket, leaving the house as unnoticed as he had entered. The violent fantasies continue, becoming a recurring comic motif in the film — until they start to come true, and we keep laughing.

The surreality of Blackmail also plays out in Dev’s workplace. Between the horny imaginings of his colleague Anand, Dev’s own antics involving stealing desk photographs of colleagues’ wives, and some insinuations that the boss might have an interest in Dev, the office emerges as a place of suppressed sexual fantasy, without actually showing us any sex.

In the middle-class cinema of the ’70s (Ghar, Chhoti Si Baat, Rajnigandha, even an eventually sad film like Gharonda), the office had a warm, collegial air. Colleagues and bosses in those films often offered a space of faux-kinship to young men and women carving out a new kind of urban life. That innocuous world of gossip and friendly banter has been gradually replaced by a space of corporate alienation and suppressed viciousness, even when there might be an occasional real relationship built there. In this regard, Blackmail follows films as different in tone as Trapped, Pyaar ka Punchnama, Island City and Tu Hai Mera Sunday. Deo makes at least one explicit reference to this sea-change in our cinema — he names a new female employee Prabha (the name of Vidya Sinha’s character in Chhoti Si Baat), activating and then gleefully subverting the old-school expectations of that name.

Blackmail has a perverse, madcap quality that remains rare in Hindi cinema, and it pulls off this lunacy to a great extent. Kirti Kulhari’s Reena could have done with some more interiority, but I thoroughly enjoyed the darkly comic exchanges between the brazen Ranjit and his disbelieving wife Dolly (the marvellous Divya Dutta), starting with her calling him Tommy (“Toh kya seedha kutta hi bol dun?” she says sarcastically when he objects). There are no confidences unbroken here, and no redemption. Any love that might exist remains unrequited, and thus eventually turns into vengefulness.

As he did in Delhi Belly, Deo creates a world bubbling over with politically incorrect laughs, with most emotion buried deep below the surface. But the chain of mutual exploitation is given rather too literal form, for instance in a dustbin marked ‘Use Me’ that becomes a leitmotif. Textual messaging, in fact, is Deo’s directorial weakness, with neon signs, video games and mobile phones alike being frequently used to deliver emotional cues or commentary. If you can ignore this cinematic equivalent of hitting us over the head with a blunt instrument, the poker-faced performances in Blackmail do manage to gesture to a deep core of despair.​

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 Apr 2018.

Film Review: Sahib, Biwi Aur Gangster Returns doesn’t have a boring moment

With 2011’s Sahib Biwi Aur Gangster, Tigmanshu Dhulia gave us a fascinating contemporary take on Abrar Alvi’s Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam. Like the 1962 film, Dhulia’s narrative revolved around the titular trio of a dissolute nawab, a neglected alcoholic wife and a rustic young man who gets increasingly embroiled in the intrigues of the haveli. The stark villainy and innocence of the older film had already been replaced, in the 2011 reimagining, by a loving embrace of gray. With Sahib, Biwi Aur Gangster Returns, Dhulia shakes himself entirely free of a desire for cinematic homage, setting his superbly etched characters free to roam. As free as they can be, that is to say, in the stifling universe he has created for them.

For this is a world of princely privilege, no doubt, but there is something rotten at its core—and even its proudest inhabitants cannot ignore the stench. In a scene about halfway through SBGR, the eponymous Sahib – Jimmy Sheirgill, absolutely stellar as the wheelchair-bound but still rakishly virile Aditya Pratap Singh – chances upon his more-or-less estranged wife – a voluptuous, bored Mahi Gill – displaying the treasures of their drawing room to a camera-wielding American and her Indian handler. This is my house, not a museum, he says angrily as he shows them the door – it is a mahal, not yet a maqbara. But even the incandescence of his rage cannot prevent us from seeing that while the Sahib may be alive, the world his haveli represents is in its death throes.

Dhulia does an even better job than in the previous film of mapping this murky new universe, where a hereditary claim to royalty is no longer enough to run things, and power must be grabbed by the scruff of the neck, even if it gets one’s hands dirty. The Sahib may wish to be continued to be called Raja sahab, but he is most definitely on his way to becoming a neta—and finding the word distasteful does not prevent him from being a very clever one.

Set in the fictitious ex-principality of Devgarh, in the poverty-ridden badlands of Uttar Pradesh, SBGR unfolds against the backdrop of a political move to partition the state into four (something actually suggested by real-life Chief Minister Mayawati in 2011). And like in the previous film, Dhulia allows himself the luxury of a buffoonish neta – Rajeev Gupta in a masterful performance as the blue-film-watching Prabhu Tiwari.

But the electoral politics of democracy has by no means succeeded in leaching this world of its fascination with lineage. And nowhere is this fascination more evident than in the figure of Inderjit Singh – the titular gangster, not born to kingly splendour but insistent on acquiring it. Played with brilliant insight and flourish by the incomparable Irrfan Khan, Inder exemplifies the strange stranglehold of India’s old world over the new. He may not be a raja, but his admirers call him Raja Bhaiyya – and he himself lives in the hope of recapturing the imagined lost glories of his royal blood.

Lineage, in fact, is the very lifeblood of Dhulia’s narrative universe. And while the masculinity of its men is tied irrevocably to their notions of caste pride and family honour (“Khamakha ek thakur ke haath ek thakur kam ho jaata,” goes one wry line), keeping a lineage going needs women. So it is the Badi Rani who actually sets the film’s plot in motion, by showing up one morning to incite her stepson to produce an heir—and when he bitterly dismisses the possibility of doing so with his current wife, by tempting him with the photographic vision of a new one. And even the romance between Irrfan’s rough-tongued Inder and Soha Ali Khan’s properly delicate Ranjana, for all its tender playfulness, cannot but be seen also as part of Inder’s plan to reacquire princely status – for what better way to do so than by marrying a princess?

But if princesses are made pawns in these carefully plotted games, they do not quite act as the willing footsoldiers their men might have liked. And in their desperate, unpredictable departures from the paths dictated to them lie the intricacies of Tigmanshu Dhulia’s plot.

It would be criminal to give away any of the multiple twists and turns that animate the film, but let me just say that SBGR doesn’t have a boring moment. It is aided by the almost uniformly high quality of its actors. Sheirgill and Khan may walk away with the honours, but Gill must get credit for having perfected the near-stumbling alcoholic’s walk and slightly unhinged flirtatiousness of her inherently over-the-top Madhavi. Soha Ali Khan does not have the world’s most mobile face, and she is often somewhat wooden here too. But she is perfectly cast, springing so superbly to life at one magisterial scene at the royal breakfast table that one cannot but think of her real-life princess-ness. There is also the pleasure of watching Raj Babbar inhabit a nicely written role as Soha’s father, the perfectly nicknamed Bunny Uncle.

If any complaint can be made about this film, it might be that occasionally there is too much going on – never too little. Between these murders and machinations, plots and counterplots, it affords its greedy audience the pleasure of vicarious glimpses into the life of the classy rajwara: polo matches and rifle practice, shairi and jazz bands. But – and this is where Dhulia shows how fine his grip is on both his material and tone – even the retro jazz crooner in her golden gown is not meant to provide an escape from this stifling world. In Dhulia’s measured, unforgiving vision, she can only be a lyrical medium for a cruel comment on thwarted dreams.

(Published on Firstpost.)