Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Khamosh, Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s sophomore feature film direction, is a film-within-a-film made in the tradition of a classic whodunit. A film-crew has come to the beautiful town of Pehelgaum (in Kashmir) to shoot a movie. Things however take a dramatic turn when a supporting actress (and a wannabe heroine) mysteriously commits suicide. In comes a military man who is convinced that the lady has been murdered, thus kick-starting a chain of events that results in a few more murders with the blame being serially shifted from one person to another. As the murky plot unfolds, we realize that hardly any character is capable of occupying a moral high-ground; rather, ugliness and deceit define most of them, irrespective of what their public veneers suggest. The movie boasts of a terrific ensemble cast – Naseeruddin Shah, as the no-nonsense military man who makes unraveling the killer his personal agenda; Amol Palekar, as a famous actor and a mild-mannered man; Shabana Azmi, as an award-winning actress and a somnambulist; Sadashiv Amrapurkar, as the director; Ajit Vachani, as the film’s lascivious producer; Pankaj Kapoor, as the producer’s alcoholic brother, to name a few. It’s not that the plot is completely bereft of discrepancies, but they never came in the way of my enjoying this delectably suspenseful and tightly structured murder mystery.
Director: Vidhu Vinod Chopra
Genre: Thriller/Mystery
Language: Hindi
Country: India
Monday, August 8, 2011
Directed by Ketan Anand, son of Chetan Anand (whose debut film Neecha Nagar was the first Indian film to win at Cannes Film Festival), Shart was part of 1980’s “parallel Indian cinema” movement. Consequently the psychological thriller was given the look and aesthetics of an art-house movie with emphasis on character dynamics and pace (or rather, lack of it) instead of content (storyline). The movie’s premise is very interesting. It begins with the gruesome murder of a hooker by a mysterious serial-killer. A capable cop, who’s famous for achieving results, is given charge of the case, and he traces the killer to his best friend in college (though they aren’t in touch with each other now). Quite obviously, the director’s intent wasn’t to create a tale of murder mystery; rather, it was to bring out the two characters, and the choices and moments that lead them to take divergent routes in their lives. Unfortunately, the promise that the film potentially had was never realized thanks to subpar storytelling and shoddy treatment by the director, not to mention the weak script. The most jarring aspect of this pseudo-arthouse film lied in the pretentious filmmaking combined with the director’s inability to go beyond the lurid and the clichéd. Though provided with a weakly developed character, Naseeruddin Shah's performance remains one of the few praiseworthy facets of the film.
Director: Ketan Anand
Genre: Thriller/Psychological Thriller
Language: Hindi
Country: India
