How cinema uses the horror of train accidents to tell a story

My TOI Plus column: the last in my series on trains in Indian cinema.

 

Through Indian film history, trains have often delivered not just the thrill of danger, but all the terrifying finality of death.  

A screenshot from Do Anjaane (1976), in which the train holds the key to trauma -- and to release

Over the last few weeks, this column has touched on some superbly-realised visions of the Indian railways as bringing people together, including Gulzar's Kitaab, Satyajit Ray's Nayak and Sonar Kella, and most recently, Shyam Benegal's 1986 television series Yatra. But perhaps one reason why trains appear so frequently in cinema is that their visual and aural power can be harnessed as metaphors for both one kind of experience and its opposite. Trains may often produce a sense of comfort, continuity and kinship with strangers. But they are equally capable of evoking fear, horror and a sense of rupture. The railway accident is not just about physical trauma, but the terrible finality of endings.

The metaphor-laden vision of the train accident - the train as something that causes death – appears in Indian cinema as early as 1936. Achhut Kanya, made by the German director Franz Osten for Himanshu Rai's studio Bombay Talkies, featured established star (and Rai's wife) Devika Rani as the 'untouchable' heroine Kasturi, whose relationship with the Brahmin hero (Ashok Kumar, then an industry newbie) ends in tragedy on the railway tracks. An annotation on the archival film website cine.ma describes Achhut Kanya as “[a] circular story told in flashback, in which eternal repetition is only interrupted with death in the form of the relentlessly linear railway engine”.

The film uses the train in multiple ways. It begins, for instance, with a husband and wife in a car, who are stopped at a railway crossing by a guard who insists that the hour before the train arrives, is a time of ghosts. Soon after, the couple find a little shrine to Kasturi nearby, and a local ascetic tells them the story of how she lived and died here – ie, the story of the film. Kasturi was the daughter of a railway crossing guard, and an early scene evokes her childish pride in her father's power to stop the train by waving the red flag. Stilted though the staging seems 85 years later, there's an undeniable pathos to the fact that the same railway guard's daughter dies trying to stop the train. One could extend that thought: If the train represents modernity, the 'achhut' girl's belief in it - and in her hold over it - fails her miserably.

The figure of the approaching train continues to be an agent of death, as I have written in previous weeks, in the films of Bimal Roy and Satyajit Ray. More than the accident, it is the possibility of suicide that appears in these narratives and many others throughout the middle decades of the 20^th century. Over and over again, young people driven to hopelessness by the harsh, relentless city, find themselves walking towards the train tracks, or climbing the stairs to a railway bridge to fling themselves off it.

By the 1970s, as I've argued earlier, the association between trains and violence becomes an increasingly common motif, at least in Hindi films. Trains conjure up both the excitement of speed and the horror of accidental death, making them a thriller staple. The technological fantasy suggested by a film like Parwana reached a kind of acme (or nadir) in The Burning Train (1980), an action thriller-disaster film about the creation and sabotage of “the fastest train in India”. But the violent train scene from that decade that has stayed with me from watching it as a child is Dulal Guha's Do Anjaane (1976), in which the duplicitous Prem Chopra pushes his friend (Amitabh Bachchan) off a moving train, to aid his romance with his friend's ambitious wife (Rekha).

Watching Do Anjaane again this week (while trying to ignore its deeply misogynistic take on women's ambitions), I found that the film is actually built around train-related trauma. It starts with a rather smug Bachchan drinking and driving alone. Suddenly, out of the darkness, a train approaches. It seems to be coming right at him. He lets out a scream and swerves wildly, hitting a tree. As he is revived after the accident, we learn that he had lost his memory from the previous trauma of his brush with death. The encounter with another speeding train triggers its return six years later – and leads to a complex revenge plot, in which that murder attempt is recreated for a Bengali film called Raater Train ('The Night Train').

In 2007, Sriram Raghavan made a thriller called Johnny Gaddaar, crammed with cinematic references, including a long quotation, from Parwana: The train scene. Like Bachchan in that film, Neil Nitin Mukesh in Johnny Gaddaar commits a crime whose success depends on getting on and off trains, cars and planes. But in Johnny Gaddaar, the crime itself involves treacherously pushing his friend Shiva off a train - unlike Parwana, but like Do Anjaane.

 

After Shiva's disfigured corpse is found, the gang wonders how a strong man like him was physically overpowered and killed. Or was he killed at all? In the 1957 classic Pyaasa, a beggar's disfigured corpse on the train tracks is taken for the hero Vijay (Guru Dutt), letting him stage his demise. No-one cites Do Anjaane or Pyaasa in JG. But first the murderer's fear and then the others' suspicion that Shiva isn't actually dead suggest a long film-steeped history -- for the characters, and the filmmaker.

Sometimes, as in Achhut Kanya, the train feels like destiny – you rush towards it, imploringly, but it does not stop. And sometimes you manage to turn away at the very last instant -- as with Kishore Kumar in Naukri, or the incredible Pyaasa scene where the world-weary Vijay ponders the train tracks, but then crosses over safely, unlike the ill-fated beggar behind him. The train passes, only the wind stings your cheeks, and it feels like fate has not yet come for you. 

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 6 Jun 2021 and TOI Plus, 5 Jun 2021.

My Movies of the Year - I

My Mirror column:

A year-end list of the films I most enjoyed in 2018, in no particular order. The first of a two-part column. 

The season of lists is upon us, and so here I am with mine. But a caveat before I begin: this is not, repeat not, a list of the best films of 2018. I cannot make that claim, simply because there are too many 2018 releases I haven't yet watched – in Hindi, in English, in the many Indian languages, and in countries across the world. Instead, if you will all indulge me at the end of a taxing year, here is a list of films that -- in my eyes -- did their bit to redeem 2018.

Let me begin with the Hindi films, in no particular order.

Mukkabaaz: Anurag Kashyap began the year with a bang, giving us a zingy film about an aspiring boxer where all the real drama takes place outside the ring. The last time Kashyap used the poor-boxer-as-underdog-hero trope, Ranbir Kapoor's performance bit the dust along with the massive misguided missile that was its vehicle, Bombay Velvet. This time, the superb Vineet Kumar Singh (who is also the originator of the script) makes the sad-eyed struggler at the film's heart as credible as the desperate New India that surrounds him. Singh's performance as Shravan is more than matched by Jimmy Sheirgill's masterful turn as a casteist coach. Backed by a brilliant, addictive soundtrack, Kashyap crafts the caste and communal politics of Bareilly into a cinematic universe that is equal parts depressing dysfunction and joyful subversion.

Raazi: Meghna Gulzar's nailbiting thriller, based on the real-life tale of a Kashmiri Muslim woman who married into a Pakistani army family expressly to scout out state secrets, was also the most marvellously subversive Hindi film in ages, playing around with popular assumptions about gender, religion and nationalism at so profound a level that you barely know you're being played. The doll-like Alia Bhatt as a spying dulhan who sweetly smiles her way into the innermost circles of the military establishment is a masterstroke, playing not just on the anxieties of the India-Pakistan relationship but the familial anxieties around the otherness of all bahus in all sasurals. Raazi also gives us a rare burka-clad heroine who needs no saving (unlike say, the two Muslim female characters in the otherwise praiseworthy Lipstick Under My Burkha, or the award-winning 2016 short film Leeches), and a rare India-Pakistan romance that is based on mutual respect for each other's patriotism. 

Mulk: Anubhav Sinha's response to the growing representation of India's Muslims as the enemy within is a moving portrait of a middle class Banaras family that's vilified and harassed after one of its members turns out to have perpetrated a terrorist attack. Rishi Kapoor, one of those lucky male stars to get his best roles after 50, is wonderful as the portly, bearded, devout Murad Ali Mohammad, who is suddenly reduced from the respected neighbourhood Vakeel Sahab to a man in the dock as a member of a hated community. Less feted but crucial to the film's sense of tragedy is Manoj Pahwa's superb portrayal of Murad's younger brother Bilal: a not-so-clever man whose absence of judgement can appear, in a courtroom and a country arraigned against him, as the presence of guilt. Mulk etches the ordinary mixedness of both mohalla and family with warmth and lightness, but its extended courtroom sequences are a bit overwrought. But given the bigotry tearing us apart, this is the bludgeoning we need.

Stree: Director Amar Kaushik and scriptwriters Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK (themselves directors, of Shor in the City fame) have crafted a rare creature: a Hindi genre film that subverts gender stereotypes while being clever enough to never be preachy. Stuffed with great comic turns (of which Rajkummar Rao's ladies tailor hero and Pankaj Tripathi's local faux-historian are the highlights), Stree combines the chills and thrills of a small town ghost story with effortless humour. Kaushik doesn't shy away from laughter in any direction, embracing both situational goofiness and the perfectly positioned political joke: a line about the ghost being able to identify people by their Aadhar cards, or the cameo by Vijay Raaz in which we're told that the Emergency has never ended.

Andhadhun: Sriram Raghavan returns to the screen with another film that proves his irreplaceability to contemporary Hindi cinema. The film's principal ingredients suggest a chef who's having a lot of fun: an attractive blind pianist, a fading Hindi film hero playing a version of himself, Tabu doing a brilliant riff on a character she has played before – Lady Macbeth. The performances are pitch-perfect for a film that is meant to keep us guessing: Ayushmann Khurrana is sympathetic but suave; the magisterial Tabu is somehow both controlled and manic. Add a sweet old woman who may not be that sweet, a nosy Parsi neighbour who gets her just deserts, and an even more nosy child who... let me not give it away – and you get a deliciously dark confection, with Raghavan's usual bonus layers for film buffs.

Badhaai Ho: Amit Ravindernath Sharma's film is a fine new addition to several growing genres: middle class comedies, Delhi films -- and most crucially, family films that want to talk about deep, dark, once-considered-top-secret topics, eg. sex, while making us giggle. Ayushmann Khurrrana as the son of a Northern Railways TT and Sanya Malhotra as his posh girlfriend are cute together, but Neena Gupta and Gajraj Rao walk away with the honours for the warmest, most winsome couple of Hindi cinema this year.

(To be continued next week)

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Jan 2018.

Unfortunately, Him Too.

My Mirror column:

Watching the 1960 classic Shoot the Piano Player in the age of #MeToo makes one realise that most men’s views on women haven’t changed much in 58 years.

Sriram Raghavan might be the biggest film nerd we have among current Hindi film directors, and in his most recent release, the savagely funny Andhadhun, he’s on a roll. The film’s starting premise as a thriller-—what happens when a blind pianist ends up being the only witness to a crime?—is swiftly buried under an avalanche of twists, making it impossible to write about without spoilers.

Watching Andhadhun felt like a rare reprieve in a harrowing week when #MeToo testimonies from media and Bollywood began to make a long overdue dent in Indian patriarchy. So I particularly didn’t want to ruin it for anyone who hasn’t yet had the chance to catch it. Instead, I thought, I’d follow up on one of Raghavan’s references by watching Shoot the Piano Player: Francois Truffaut’s 1960 cult classic from the French New Wave which, like Andhadhun, features a piano player embroiled in a crime.

Imagine my surprise, then, when this sparkling Truffaut film actually turned out to be about men and women: what men think of women, how they behave as a consequence and what women think they must do in response. In other words, things we are still grappling with 58 years later—and doing so badly at that we desperately need #MeToo.

The first scene has a man running in the dark, a car hot on his heels. He careens down an ill-lit pavement and gets knocked out by a lamppost. It feels like film noir. So when another man appears and slaps the fallen man’s face, one doesn’t know whether he is friend or foe. But then the stranger helps him up and says, “I’ve gotta run. She still waits up for me,”—and with that, Truffaut has engineered the first of the nonstop changes of tone that mark this film, from thriller to droll humour.


“I wish I were married, too,” says the first man. The ensuing dialogue tracks the emotional turnarounds of coupledom with a remarkable throwaway honesty: he went with her for a year before developing feelings and buying a ring. Still, the marriage didn’t start well: “I’d watch her over breakfast, wondering how to get rid of her.” “A question of freedom, maybe?” inquires the first man. The second shrugs. When his wife first gave birth, he says, he fell in love with her.


In one of those bits of non-linearity that mark this as a New Wave film, the married man disappears, and the injured man dashes off to a bar to appeal for help to his brother Charlie, the film’s pianist hero (played by French singing legend Charles Aznavour, who in a strange coincidence, passed away at 94 two weeks ago). Jean Cocteau once said, “Before Aznavour, despair was unpopular.” Here he plays Charlie as a shy man with sad eyes, a half-smile turning down the corners of his mouth. And yet, he is apparently a fount of wisdom on women. “Don’t be afraid of women,” he tells the bar owner Plyne. “They’re not poisonous.” “You don’t really believe that,” responds Plyne.


What’s remarkable is that this exchange takes place after a sequence featuring men doing the following: (1) singing a song complaining about a bargirl who wouldn’t “hand out” anything but beer; (2) drunkenly proposing marriage to a woman just met—and when told she isn’t single, leaning in for a kiss so that she has to flee claiming work; (3) dancing with such a laser-like focus on his dance partner’s breasts that she is moved to ask scathingly, “Is my chest that fascinating?” (Yes, says the man, I’m a doctor.)


None of these interactions are ‘serious’, and I too might have glossed over them if we hadn’t been in the historical moment we’re in. But it is hard not to see that this ‘humour’ lies at the root of our problem with consent: as Laurie Penny put it in a stellar 2017 essay, the assumption that men want sex—and women are sex. The nonstop infringement of women’s boundaries is completely normalised: this, we are told, is what men will do if women let them. It thus becomes women’s job to keep men from harassing them.

In another comic sequence, a hood who’s abducted Charlie and his girlfriend Lena says he has an “eye for a moment”: “when the wind’s going to lift a skirt, or some nice legs gonna board a bus”. “I tell you. No matter what women say, they all want it,” agrees Hood No. 2. Why else do they all dress up, why do they wear stockings when they could wear socks like us? The exchange is not criticised, though Truffaut punctures its ludicrousness when Hood No. 2 says immediately, ah yes, women would look great in knee-length socks.

In another revealing scene, a besotted Plyne pleads with Lena to “feel his muscles”, saying “I’m not just anybody”. She mocks him, and a minute later, he is declaring that “She’s a slut! She’s not a girl, she’s not a woman. A woman is pure, delicate, fragile. To me, women have always been supreme.”


The film sets Charlie up in contrast to these men. He is the supposedly sensitive man that women fall in love with. When Lena gets together with him, she says it’s because he doesn’t play the ladies’ man or the tough guy. “You’re shy, you respect women.” And yet the tenor of Charlie’s relationships is tragic for the women concerned: his waitress wife Theresa sleeps with a customer to get Charlie his break as a concert pianist, and like Lena later, ends up dead because of him.


Charlie’s father used to say about women, “If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.” Perhaps, just perhaps, that might be what Truffaut is really saying about men.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 Oct 2018.

Prisoners of the Mind

My Mumbai Mirror column yesterday:

The jail as a space holds an abiding interest for Badlapur's director Sriram Raghavan, serving as an instrument to analyse power relationships between the characters in his films.

Sriram Raghavan was a movie buff much before he became a director, and it's something he's always worn on his sleeve. In 2007's Johnny Gaddaar, his best-received film till date, Raghavan paid cinematic tribute to Vijay Anand's thriller Johnny Mera Naam, Stanley Kubrick's noir The Killing, and the celebrated murder sequence from the Amitabh Bachchan starrer Parwana - among many classics. His last outing, the rollicking (and unfairly panned) Agent Vinod, was a spy thriller: a James Bond homage served with an Indian flavour and a twinkle in the eye. In his latest, Badlapur, when the heist-and-murder-accused Laik arrives in jail for what is going to be a long stretch in captivity, the prisoners gather round a television on which Sholay is playing. "Bees baras jail mein rehne ke baad sab kucch bhool jaoge, Gabbar," announces Sanjeev's Kumar's Thakur to Amjad Khan's iconic dacoit. 

Unlike Gabbar, Nawazuddin Siddiqui's Laik completes most of his 15-year jail sentence. But as Raghavan makes clear, in Badlapur and in his gripping first feature, Ek Hasina Thi (2004), time in jail needn't wipe out memories of one's past. 

Badlapur comes a decade after Ek Hasina Thi, but the two films have much in common: The hardening of innocents, and the passage of time in expectation of revenge. In EHT, it was the trusting Sarika (Urmila Matondkar), jailed on a trumped-up charge of being the mistress of an underworld don, who went from wide-eyed child-woman to steely avenger. In Badlapur, it is Varun Dhawan's youthful family man Raghu who makes the transition to a man solely possessed by the idea of vengeance. Female revenge sagas seem to necessarily involve a physical transformation - think Khoon Bhari Maang for a classic Hindi movie example - and EHT was no exception. Matondkar's Sarika went from long crinkly locks, bell sleeves and ultra-feminine gathered skirts to a more practical crop and fitted trousers. Raghu, too, goes from wholesome and clean-shaven to stubbly and then bearded in his grief-stricken avatar. 

But Raghavan's journey from EHT to Badlapur involves much more than a simple change in the gender of his protagonist. He's playing with the same concerns - tragedy, revenge, innocence, evil - but the game feels quite different. For one, unlike in EHT, it isn't the clean-cut middle class young person (Dhawan) who is thrown into prison. It is the bad apple, the petty thief who's never done anything right, the guy who we've just seen shooting two innocents for no fault of their own. 

So, logically we ought to spend the film feeling glad: The bad guy's in prison, isn't he? But Raghavan pushes the knife in, and then turns it slowly -- Siddiqui's unforgettable portrayal of Laik makes him powerfully, unmistakeably human. He may lie in court and ogle girls on the street, but he is also a man who truly loves -- and is loved back by -- at least one woman. What is truly appealing is his zest for life. His longing for chicken korma and Thai massage remains undimmed by years in the wilderness of jail. 

Jail itself is clearly of interest to Raghavan. In EHT, it was a women's prison, a place of madness and misery, as places of female incarceration have been in films from Bimal Roy's Bandini to Bruno Dumont's affecting Camille (2013), about the real-life sculptress Camille Claudel. For the gentle Sarika, the cruel truth of her lover's betrayal only sinks in alongside the horror of what she must endure because of it. The rats in her prison cell and the terrible food are not the worst of it. It is the casual humiliations, the mindless fights, the power games and the bullying that come to make jail seem, in her mind and ours, a microcosm of the world outside. If you learn to survive this, Raghavan seems to suggest, you're equipped for anything the outside world can throw at you. 

And yet there are also those for whom jail is a refuge of sorts: The half-crazed Dolly, with whom Sarika shares her cell, declares quite seriously that prison food is delicious, while Pratima Kazmi's impressive Pramila, playing the widow of a mafia don, stays in prison voluntarily because it is a safe haven, away from both the police and gangs. 

The depiction of jail in Badlapur is quite different from that in EHT. There is the occasional bout of violence here, too. But unlike the wild, unsupervised cat-fights and the free-for-all sense of the women's prison he created in 2007, Raghavan paints Badlapur's jail as a Foucauldian space: beds in straight lines, a place of discipline and punishment. Laiq even inhabits it as a space of labour: he learns to make chairs, which will earn him money. And eventually it is the medicalisation of jail as a space, its recognition of his diseased body, which allows him to gain a few months of physical freedom. 

Meanwhile we have Raghu, who immerses himself in his grief, churning it deeper and deeper until it curdles into violence. He is physically free, but mentally incarcerated. If the relentless passage of the years, without being able to move on with one's life, is prison's real punishment, then Raghu has done as the film says: imprisoned himself in his own jail. He has made time stand still. 

Badlapur's eventual take on revenge seems to me more ambitious than film noir in the traditional sense. It reverses our ideas about what justice might mean, but also our idea of who is deserving of it.

Film Review: Ek Tha Romance

My review of Ek Tha Tiger, on Firstpost:

First, the good things: Ek Tha Tiger is the least annoying Salman Khan movie in ages. Coming after the ceaseless assaults on the senses that were Bodyguard and Ready, Salman’s performance in Ek Tha Tiger feels almost subtle. There are no bordering-on-obscene dance moves, no grotesque family members, and – believe it or not – only a single scene where he takes his shirt off.

Salman plays a RAW agent, which in the Ek Tha Tiger universe means that fans can have the pleasure of watching him perform stunts in various exciting locations, from Afghanistan to Dublin to Havana. Some of these action sequences are rather fun. The film opens, for instance, with a slow-mo Salman ridding the earth of a traitorous colleague, followed by a rather enjoyable chase through cobbled Afghan streets – director Kabir Khan, who made several documentaries in Afghanistan before making his feature debut with Kabul Express, knows how to exploit this locale.

After much catapulting from rooftops and tobogganing backwards down a flight of stone steps with a gun in each hand, Salman does a noton ki baarish with the late colleague’s ill-gotten gains, creating a nicely choreographed quasi-riot through which he can then escape.

We get the bare bones of Tiger’s home life, but it’s nicely done. The introductory scene placing him in his Delhi neighbourhood is most enjoyable: women of all ages failing to tear their eyes away from the mysterious bachelor who reappears after long absences to stand at his front door in his banian and take milk from the doodhwala. The scene with his boss Shenoy (Girish Karnad) is also a fine one, even if it hinges on some predictable farz-versus-mohabbat lines. Karnad at least has not gone the sleepwalking way of Naseeruddin Shah (Maximum) and manages to bring a bit of spark to his scenes.

The real surprise of this film is that Salman actually has a romance track that isn’t played as broad comedy or tacky trophy-wife acquisition. It may be slightly silly (witness bad jokes about Zee and Doordarshan), but it has moments of real tenderness that one would have thought Salman had forgotten how to deliver. If this return to romance has something to do with the fact that the object of his affection is played by real-life ex Katrina Kaif – well, more power to her.

Katrina is an asset to the film – as British Asian student Zoya, she not only achieves the gigantic feat of making Salman Khan appear ‘in love’, she manages to look absolutely glorious without looking synthetic. She is also about a hundred times better at action than the last desi heroine I watched try her hand at a spy thriller – Kareena Kapoor in Agent Vinod.

That brings me to the inevitable comparison between the two films, and here Ek Tha Tiger comes off rather badly. As a spy thriller, Agent Vinod was infinitely cleverer. Sriram Raghavan, too, used an implausible spy story to take us on an unapologetically colourful ride around the world – but every exotic set piece had a place in the plot. If Raghavan took us to St. Petersburg, there was an actual Russian villain and the heroine performing a dance number to distract him; if the Moroccan sequence began with Prem Chopra killing off his pet camel, there was a reason why we saw him do it; and conversely, if the director felt like giving us an old-style double mujra, we found ourselves at a glittering Karachi wedding.

In contrast, Ek Tha Tiger, though not badly shot, saunters through its locations like a contented tourist, rarely making any effort to create plotlines or characters specific to place. Even when it does – like casting Roshan Seth as a crabby old Indian scientist who lives and works in Dublin – the script gives him almost nothing to do. Ranveer Shorey, as Tiger’s colleague Gopi, is yet another instance of a marvelous actor given fairly little to chew on.

If Ek Tha Tiger is meant to be a spy thriller, it’s a disappointingly soft-boiled one. There is precisely one twist – one involving Katrina Kaif that you can see coming from a mile away – after which the film becomes an increasingly soppy, ever more unbelievable romantic saga, occasionally punctuated by fights in foreign locales.

Perhaps this should not surprise us, for this is an Aditya Chopra story, and romance must rule. And perhaps — as the box office failure of Agent Vinod and the record-breaking success of Ek Tha Tiger forces us to conclude – even when making spy thrillers, we just prefer soppy Indo-Pak romances to cleverly plotted scripts with a twinkle in their eye.

Film review: Agent Vinod

Agent Vinod is the sort of swashbuckling thriller that Hindi cinema used to do a lot of in the James-Bond-inspired 60s and 70s, but simply doesn’t do any more: a ridiculously flamboyant hero, a toothsome femme fatale (or three) and a whole galaxy of fiendish villains, all moving through a series of exotic locales in pursuit of some deliberately over-the-top Macguffin, like a “secret faarmula” that could save or sabotage the nation.

The original Agent Vinod (1977) featured Mahendra Sandhu as a government spy who stopped India’s defence secrets from falling into foreign hands. In this 2012 outing, Saif Ali Khan is a RAW agent who must save the Indian subcontinent – and the world – from a nasty nuclear bomb that comes in a suitcase.

But there any similarity ends. What Sriram Raghavan sets out to create is far more than a self-conscious, cheesy homage to the lost Indian espionage movie. As he said in one interview, he wanted to make a spy thriller that would “balance the real with the hyper-real, as well as make a film in the Indian idiom.” He’s succeeded, and how.

Right from the very first couple of frames, when Agent Vinod makes his first appearance in the dark dungeon of an Afghan camp, complete with stone-hewn walls and Osama bin Laden murals, we know we’re in a film that takes its sets and its action as seriously as the best of Hollywood. By the time we’re halfway through, the film has managed to traverse foreign locations as stunningly diverse as a Moscow cemetery in a snowstorm, the interiors of the Trans-Siberian Express, the luxurious mansions and pavement cafes of a sunny Tangiers and the squares and streets of Riga, Latvia.

Raghavan’s use of his locations is absolutely terrific, managing to consistently place the action in them while also evoking mood by the dollopful. I particularly loved the Charlie Chaplin film playing on an outdoor screen in Riga, and the smokey blue interiors of the love hotel in which he shoots the marvelously affecting ‘Raabta’ song. It’s an inspired sequence involving couples fighting, kissing and making up while a tender love song and a shootout unfold simultaneously around them.

The screenplay by Raghavan and co-writer Arijit Biswas moves at a fast clip, from one location to another, from one wonderfully satisfying set-piece to the next. Among the smaller (but no less important) pleasures of Agent Vinod is the fact that everyone on screen – the steward on the plane, the man in the square in Tangiers who is asked to take a photograph, the bespectacled man reading a newspaper at the back of the restaurant – is potentially a part of its gigantic jigsaw puzzle of a plot.


And scattered across this world is a superb array of devilish villains: an almost unrecognisable and splendid Ram Kapoor in a St. Petersburg world of cavernous nightclubs that look like they used to be churches; a more familiar Prem Chopra in white and gold robes in a Moroccan mansion; the wonderful Shahbaz Khan as a one-eyed renegade ISI general; the somewhat wasted Gulshan Grover at a glorious Karachi wedding; and the superb Adil Hussain (until now best known as Vidya Balan’s ‘husband’ from Ishqiya, but that is set to change) as the threateningly urbane ‘Colonel’.

And how can one forget to mention Dhritiman Chatterjee, a marvellous actor who proved his mettle in Bengali cinema years ago, but is only now being discovered by Hindi filmmakers. His role in Kahaani and now in Agent Vinod ought to make him indispensable to Bollywood, though one hopes, without being typecast.

What distinguishes Agent Vinod from a straight-up James Bond movie or a gritty copy of the dead-serious Bourne films is the twinkle in its eye. One instance is the use of the O meri jaan maine kaha number in a sequence where Kareena must dance to distract a loathsome fat man for a good cause (evoking Padma Khanna’s energetic faux-seduction of Prem Nath in Johnny Mera Naam). There’s the supremely enjoyable double mujra in Karachi of the kind we haven’t seen in years — where Kareena joins the adept Maryam Zakaria in the wonderful Dil mera muft ka. The greying Moroccan men singing Pyaar Pyaar na raha at a rather opportune moment are wonderful, as are the absolutely stellar Delhi ladies who insist on going to Kinari Bazar in an auto that they don’t realise has been commandeered for quite another purpose. Raghavan makes it abundantly clear that he takes humour and naach-gaana as seriously as anything else.

The man who made Ek Hasina Thi — a chilling Delhi-set thriller which also gave Saif his first bad guy role – now gives us a superbly shot Delhi action climax, involving not just autos and the Kinari Bazaar ladies, but also HoHo buses and rooms full of Godrej almirahs.

The only times the tone of the film wavers is when Kareena – playing a Pakistani woman called Iram Parveen Billal – has her confessional moments, mouthing such unnecessary lines as “Tumne meri jaan bachayi” with a teary-eyed deliberateness that annoyed me. But this is mere quibbling about a thoroughly enjoyable film which displays ambition and style in a measure that we rarely see in Bollywood, especially not in a genre film. Agent Vinod makes not just Players but Don 2 look ridiculous. More, please.

Published on Firstpost.com on 23 Mar 2012