I wonder if The Third Man had been that effective, that clever without Anton Karas' zither strumming every time a new plot twist was dished up on the screen. Sure, it would still have Sir Carol Reed's finely calibrated direction, the legendary Graham Greene's sardonic and swift script and Robert Krasker's twisted yet poetic camera angles (not to forget those memorable turns from Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles) but would it be that much fun as an unforgettable slice of cocoa-dark noir as it was with those jaunty strings ringing whimsically, be it when people are chased through cobblestoned, cold-blooded Vienna at night or when they are discovering inconvenient truths about each other? I don't think so.
Indeed, the greatest, most sleekest of our cinematic mysteries need to have some of the loveliest music of all time. We need a Bernard Hermann to make us hear the frenzied slashing of a knife, we need a John Williams to make our collective hearts beat when something under the water is heading our way. And as evidenced in Reed's classic, we need, of all things, a zither to orchestrate mayhem.
In his latest firecracker of a thriller, Sriram Raghavan picks out a grand piano.
References would be obvious, especially to the fascinating short film The Piano Tuner but the director, always with a flair for doffing his hat to eclectic reference points and then tweaking them in his own inimitably saucy style, uses that one concept, of a prodigy whose impairment works as heavenly inspiration as well as a social disguise, and fleshes it out beautifully, almost audaciously, into a rattling good yarn of murder, betrayal and greed that would have made the Coen Brothers rub their hands in anticipation. All this while the piano keeps on tinkling as it should be, like a Ray Manzarek solo any to lend poetic weight to Jim Morrison's psychedelic visions.
Akash is an aspiring pianist who also happens to be blind. He is all alone and he has enough reason to grumble about being holed up in Pune's Prabhat Colony with only a cat for company but he is always looking at the brighter side of things. A winsome and vivacious girl warms up to his deft finger-work at piano keys after she nearly runs him over with her two-wheeler and soon, things are looking even sunnier than ever. Until, of course, an ageing and visibly self-indulgent Bollywood old-timer, with his heyday long behind him in the past, is equally won over by his talents and asks him to come home one afternoon for an anniversary surprise for his wife.
Yesteryear chocolate boy Anil Dhawan plays this faded celebrity Pramod Sinha with juicy relish and as witnessed in both Johnny Gaddar and Agent Vinod, Raghavan and co-writers Arijit Biswas, Pooja Ladha Surti, Yogesh Chandekar and Hemanth Rao have a rollicking time with this veteran actor cast largely as a self-obsessed version of himself, poring over comments on videos of his memorable songs on YouTube and gloating that he has lovers from a country as far as Denmark. To which his wife, a strikingly handsome and alluringly comely dame, played by one of the finest actresses of all time, pipes, a little more than helpfully, 'Isn't that where Hamlet was set?'
At the appointed hour, Akash comes with practiced fingers and innocence and we find this wife, who was, moments earlier, cooking up crab with more mischievous allure than Nigella Lawson herself, all harried and dazed. Perhaps it is time for us all, as Raghavan demonstrates with devilish wit, to pull off our blindfolds and see just what is happening.
Many a thriller has come on Bollywood that has played with the same tropes of unwitting witnesses to the most dastardly of crimes. What distinguishes Andhadhun from them all is how it subverts the template completely and becomes so much more than just about a death in the afternoon. This film is not just one Agatha Christie murder mystery told with the grimmest of humour and the most juicy, pulpy detail; it is, in fact, more than all noir classics piled up together, a film doffing its hat more to the moral greyness found in the 'entertainments' of Graham Greene than to Fargo yet beautifully original, berserk and even poetic in its own way, a bar of the darkest chocolate filled with much fruity oddballs and nutty laughs to enjoy along with the unmistakably bitter taste of cocoa.
I refuse to reveal anything more about what happens. It would be suffice to say that the director, like a potboiler writer on steroids, hurtles us through a racy and raunchy narrative that keeps on pulling the rug beneath our feet. It is all marvellously heady writing, even audacious as the film leaves behind the main crime and instead plunges us and its characters into shenanigans that would be deemed incredulous in any other film. Indeed, they are outrageous but they become such daring leaps of narrative direction that they become ingenious, intuitive twists that we never are able to see coming.
The cast is uniformly brilliant, with my special praise reserved for Manav Vij as a beefed-up yet easily embarrassed cop who is touted to gobble up 16 eggs in a day, by his ernest wife played brilliantly by Raghavan regular Ashwini Kalsekar, and Zakir Hussain (another Raghavan favourite) as a shady practitioner; yet, that is all I am going to say about all these wonderfully written and acted characters, including not-so-familiar faces cast in delicious parts that do them justice. Ayushmann Khurrana, playing the seemingly naive Akash, is irresistible in his boyish charm and, as the film darkens handsomely with each minute, we see him revealing layer after layer and by then, he is already an entertainingly unreliable narrator of the increasingly tangled thread; we might not trust him completely anymore but thanks to Khurrana's pitch-perfect spontaneity, we root for him nevertheless.
Then, there is Tabu. A consummate performer who seldom lets us down, here is the already incredibly ravishing and hypnotic actress at her best, playing a lady who is called, in yet another brilliant stroke of snark, as 'Lady Macbeth' by a character but who is really a lot more enigmatic and lethally lovely than any description. The lady has always been unbelievably good with dames that struggle with their hearts and minds but in Andhadhun, she is made to balance the loveably raw naïveté that made her so endearing as a sweet-faced leading lady in the 1990s and her impeccable flair in flashing every shade of grey, as evidenced in her incredible portrayals in serious fare. It is a tall order but Tabu edges both sides neatly and creates a compelling woman we cannot help being seduced by, even if it only means our inevitable doom. She is not just a femme fatale; rather she is a femme with whom we share a particularly fatal attraction.
And finally, as with all Raghavan films, the music is as indispensable as the rest of the craft, as intriguing and compelling as K.U Mohanan's slick, stealthy camerawork that cleverly omits little details so that they can then play ingeniously into the narrative when least expected. Amit Trivedi's swooning piano solos are blended brilliantly together with those of Beethoven and the director's trademark retro fetish is as devilishly entertaining as ever. Covers of classics of both Dhawan's films and Rajesh Khanna blockbusters are played to underline the choicest moments with subtle yet spiky irony.
Andhadhun is not just a thriller for ages. It is also, like the immaculately crafted Johnny Gaddar, a delicious slice of absurdist comedy that plays out in this utterly believable theatre of suburban noir staged to perfection, a rattling yarn that transforms from a whodunnit to a who-saw-what and who-did-not-see-what blended together. And somewhere in the midst of it all, there is a 'third man' involved. Now that is really special.
My Rating- 5 Stars Out Of 5
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