I would like to think that Ian Fleming would have enjoyed Sriram Raghavan’s Agent Vinod.
For him, the irascible hedonist, the self-indulgent yet cheekily stylish entertainer and the incorrigible globe-trotter, the code-named, nearly anonymous agent of the film would have been a truer version of James Bond of his novels than the one that was served up on the screen, especially the version that was played by Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan. Sure, Sean Connery was Commander Bond, right from the scene in Dr. No when we saw him sizing up Sylvia Trench with his shrewdly seductive gaze and thespian Timothy Dalton and delicious Brit-stud Daniel Craig worked real hard at digging out the sadistic pathos that lay wound up inside the Bond of the books.
But Agent Vinod, borrowing a name from the vintage Bollywood secret agent played by Mahendra Sandhu in the 1977 film of the same name, comes across as more closely cut out to 007 as Fleming knew him best: a coolly brisk and, sometimes, cruelly malicious intelligence man, one that we cannot quite love or admire but one whom we can trust to get the most sticking of all jobs, that is saving the world, right in the nick of time.
The film begins, with a quip from, of all people, Eli Wallach’s rollickingly raunchy Tuco from Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. It then opens in the middle of a sunbaked desert in Afghanistan, with the somber swells of a harmonica playing in the background. The nod at Leone is ingenious here. As in Once Upon A Time In The West, the wailing of the harmonica sets the stage for a gritty standoff in the sand and Raghavan hands us just that, plunging us in a pre-credits howler of an action scene that feels terse and thrilling without being bombastic and knows just when to end.
Again of course, much of the film is punctuated with a trademark snarky sense of humour. As with Johnny Gaddar and the latest crackling thriller Andhadhun, nods at films and vintage Bollywood music come thick and fast but they are all as much a part of the pulpy, thick narrative rather than just window-dressing. This film is a deliciously nutty feast for those who don’t just love their capers, comedies and spy films but also remember the smallest details. At one point, a character pleads innocence on the word of a certain Iftekhar who, as revealed by the skeptical men in charge of asking questions, turns out to have been killed, adding to the pretender’s woes. At another, a MI6 agent is named Richard Maibaum and, in yet another moment, a suspected spy being interrogated with Pentothal blurts out in song that his name is Anthony Gonsalves. Be ready to have a smile of pure, cinematic pleasure wash over your face.
But then that is the real fun of watching a spy caper like Agent Vinod, gleefully borrowing influences from films both English and Hindi and making them so much a part of the plot itself, so that we also return to those films and enjoy them in a different light. One of the reasons why we still enjoy films like any of the Indiana Jones outings or even the classic James Bond films is the way they felt like reflections of the popular fashions and fads of entertainment. This is why we still smile when Bond jokes about the Beatles and quips ‘Play it again, Sam’. Raghavan does more than that: he lets us share his love for that particular film, that particular line or detail that stays etched as a remnant of the experience of watching a film in the subconscious. Pritam’s mostly catchy songs take a backseat to a R.D Burman cabaret number, played to puncture the tension with comic relief in one scene and an older classic sung by Mukesh, a lament for harsh realities of the present, when everybody realises just how high the stakes are.
That would be a question for any uninitiated viewer: just how thrilling is Agent Vinod as a spy movie, as a movie about a heroic and intelligent secret agent saving the day from apocalypse? It is a commendably fast and thrilling film, with a pulpy plot that twists and turns quite stealthily and while Raghavan and co-writer Arijit Biswas have enough fun in between, what with the film references and characters that belong more to an entertaining comic book of entertainingly pompous villains than to any spy novel, they never lose sight of the main drive of the plot, concerning a nuclear bomb with a book of verse as its unlikely trigger. The film dispenses mostly with sentimentality and bombast as well; even as it stumbles on its overarching ambition towards a desperate and harried end, it remains fairly immediate and urgent. It also argues how organised terrorism is more of a game of self-interest and economic subterfuge than any dedicated cause or agenda.
All this comes as a sharp and sublime relief to the other Bollywood spy movies, in which we have a muscled and brawny action hero posing as an intelligent spy and taking on stock stereotypes of Middle-Eastern terrorist leaders who are modelled superficially and needlessly on their more sinister real-life counterparts, shoddily imitating the more well-rounded characterisation in English-language films. The cast, as always with the director, is pretty memorable. With the sole exception of Ram Kapoor’s ham-fisted, Russian-speaking crime boss Abu Nazer, dubbed memorably as Bud Spencer, the film’s melee of kingpins and suave scoundrels includes yesteryear villain Prem Chopra as the world-weary chieftain David Kazan and Shahbaz Khan as the formidable corrupt ISI bigwig Huzefa. Adil Hussain is a memorably sleek and self-assured operator as the devilish Colonel while promising veterans like Zakir Hussain and Lalit Parimoo get delectable, if smaller, parts that we want more of.
The film maintains a very solid balance between classic spy movie tropes and the most modern tricks, with the action hurtling from frenetic car chases to gritty fistfights. Agent Vinod shuttles from one exquisite location to another but the choice of locations, like the in-jokes, is pointed and serves its purpose in the plot. Cinematographer C.K. Muraleedharan and long-time editor Pooja Ladha Surti refute touristy exotica in favour of a more coolly perceptive sense of location and milieu. Little quirks like a wizened old man singing a Raj Kapoor song in a Moroccan street café or a leather-clad biker crying foul in frosty Riga are done very well and so are two knockout action scenes in the film: one, a marvellous single-take shootout inside a motel with a few sneaky surprises in store and the other, a physical fist-cuff set to the music of a Ilayaraja chartbuster that, thanks to Surti’s brilliant editing, shuffles from an opulent auction hall to a Sri Lankan ghetto at night.
In Saif Ali Khan’s Agent Vinod, we get an Indian secret agent, who, like the movie around him, is refreshingly casual yet coolly focused about his job. The only time he loses his cool is when he finds himself stumbling on the real horror of the big conspiracy but thanks to Khan’s immaculate flair at both a natural conviction and unflappable style, he takes on the challenge with determined efficiency, without ever losing his vulnerability or charisma. Pitted against him is Kareena Kapoor’s surprisingly effective Iram, an enigmatic femme fatale in the beginning and then a sad-eyed damsel who is seeking the idyllic happiness that is nowhere to be found in this game of cloaks and daggers. The film lets her reign her interplay with Khan with her inherent confidence and grace but it is also empathetic to her increasing predicament at the real nature of the game being played. Thankfully, romance is only hinted between them and the natural chemistry between the actors is never stretched into a full-fledged love story.
The opening quote is about the interchangeability of names and identities and eventually, in a brilliant stroke, Agent Vinod deals with that; the hero never reveals his real name, which could be anything and also, names and identities of other characters become MacGuffins and red herrings themselves. Khan keeps his anonymous hero on a very finely balanced edge between a firm sense of heroism and a flippant air of enjoying what he has to do. Unlike our most Bollywood spies, who are chest-thumping flag-bearers of nationalism, here is a hero who will save his nation but will play it cool for most of the time.
It is this self-depreciation, this knowing awareness of the chinks in armour that are to be found in almost the novels (and subsequently in none of the movies, where we are compelled to applaud his obvious advantage over the grand villain or smooth seduction of a beautiful woman), that makes Agent Vinod so effective as a spy action film coming from Bollywood. Raghavan and Biswas fashion this titular character with all the flourishes that we have come to associate any dashing secret agent with, from the smartly tailored tuxedo to the pithy quips, but, in a particularly subversive stroke, make him colder, more cynical and strip him of any gadgets worthy of Q Branch and instead leave him on his own in his mission, trusting his dirty and gritty fighter instinct to escape trouble. As I said, Fleming would have smiled and raised a toast, inevitably shaken and stirred, to this film.
No comments:
Post a Comment