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.