Kahaani (dir. Sujoy Ghosh, 2012)

 

I’ll confess that I wasn’t a great fan of Sujoy Ghosh’s first film, Jhankaar Beats – somehow I couldn’t connect with his protagonists (three men trying to win a music competition), and though I appreciated the reverence shown towards music great RD Burman, I felt it there was an incredible earnestness about it all that served to bog the film down for me.  Ghosh is in good company:  it’s an emotion I totally found marred my enjoyment of Claude Zidi’s film Astérix & Obélix contre César.  (and that was totally absent from Alain Chabat’s highly irreverent and wickedly fun sequel Astérix & Obélix: Mission Cléopâtre) I’d like to think, though,  that Ghosh would be happy to find himself in good company with the otherwise excellent Monsieur Zidi.

I reviewed Ghosh’s last film,  Aladin,  for Bollyspice, and rather liked it.  I had the distinct impression that Ghosh was moving into more irreverent territory, putting his own twist on the Aladin story, and if the film did not succeed, it was, I think, because Ghosh was attempting to take a whole bunch of influences and turn them into something of his own, and he didn’t quite manage it.  I remember thinking, though, that I thought I would look back at Aladin as an important film in Ghosh’s filmography, and after having seen Kahaani, I don’t think I’m wrong.

The difference this time ‘round?  In Kahaani, Ghosh manages to take all the things that inform him as a creative person, as a writer, as a director, as a storyteller – manages to mold them into something that truly is (despite some small reservations that I have) his most original and refreshing film to date.

Vidya Bagchi (Vidya Balan) arrives in Kolkata.  Heavily pregnant, she is there to try to figure out what has happened to her husband, who has gone missing.  She attracts the sympathies of Rana (Parambrata Chatterjee), a local policeman, who helps her try to find out what has happened to her husband, just as everyone else, including IB officer Khan (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is trying to convince her that there is no record of him ever having been to Kolkota.

Kahaani is, as its title suggests, a film about stories, and there are a number of people in this film telling a number of stories, and no one is what they seem (a point that is subtly underlined when Rana tells Vidya that people in Kolkota have two names, an official name and a pet name.  “Two different identities,” she astutely observes.  The trick, though, is to differentiate between fact and fiction, making it difficult to talk about the film without actually giving the whole mystery away.  I will say that Kahaani is not a perfect film – I actually figured out some of the main plot threads long before the climactic twist, and the more I think about the film, the more I realize there’s a little bit of viewer manipulation going on, that is putting some people off the film.

The thing with thrillers and mysteries is, you have to give your reader/viewer all the information he/she needs to solve the puzzle.  If you don’t supply enough information, and pull details out of thin air that no one knows about, then you’re not creating a satisfying story -- in fact, you're cheating.  On the other hand, if you supply too many details, you run the risk that your viewer/reader will solve the puzzle far sooner than you’d intended – and this is, I think, the main problem with Kahaani.  Ghosh and his fellow writers (he shares a story credit with Advaita Kala and  screenplay credit with Suresh Nair and Nikhil Vyas) give us a few too many clues, too soon, and once the central mystery surrounding Vidya and the disappearance of her husband is out of the bag, it’s too late, and the climax becomes a bit of an anti-climax. 

I was able to push myself not to think too much and to just go with the flow of the story.  On the whole, I found Kahaani a very satisfying film, though I have to admit,  I think that for me that had more to do with some deliciously good performances, the use of the Durga Puja as a leitmotif to anchor the story, and, especially the use of Kolkota.  Kolkota is shot in such a way as to show it as oppressive and overwhelming – something that reminded me of Ribhu Dasgupta’s film Michael.  There, Kolkota serves as an backdrop to make us feel the continuing loss of sight of the main character, Michael (Naseerudin Shah), as he gradually slips into a world of confusion.  In Kahaani, too, Kolkota assaults our sense, adding to our sympathy and connection with Vidya as she arrives in the city and tries to make sense of everything.

The release of Kahaani could not have been timed more perfectly, coinciding as it does with Adam’s Rib, this month of celebrating women in Indian cinema.  In an interview with BBC’s Love Bollywood programme, Ghosh said that one of the things he wanted to explore in his film is how motherhood  changes a woman – how it changes her perspective on life, on her responsibilities, and I think the film does an excellent job of portraying a woman who is utterly determined to fight for those she loves.

I mentioned the use of the Durga Puja – not only does this add to our sensory pleasure in watching the film, seeing the preparations for the festival, but it adds an incredible depth to the character of Vidya.  

For Durga, of course, is the warrior goddess, a figure seen as calm and self-possessed even as she engages in battle.  Stories of Durga’s battles against demons are meant to be symbolic of our own inner struggles against  those parts of our personality which can be seen at worst as destructive and at best harmful – through Durga, we undergo a kind of catharsis or a purification.

And this is precisely what is so compelling about Vidya Bagchi – she is the warrior mother, determined to battle the forces of evil that threaten her and her family.  This is why, quite simply, I think she’s an incredibly compelling character, and Vidya Balan delivers a performance that I think is even better and more empowering than that of Silk in The Dirty Picture.  Vidya Bagchi is intelligent, determined, powerful, and even ruthless in her pursuit of the truth.

Even when that truth is not quite what it seems.

 

 

Comments

[getfilmy]

Hehe, I fell hook, line and sinker for the puzzle so it totally worked for me. I can't even imagine what it must be like to watch it for the first time if you've figured out the truth! Will definitely have to watch more closely with the DVD. SPOILER:***Even if you figure out the identity though, didn't the flashbacks throw you off? That was my main complaint, along with a few others (like the logic of the photo).***END SPOILER

Agree about the Durga puja - it was done brilliantly, getting the point across without overdoing it. I also loved Vidya way more in this than TDP which I thought was a bit more of a "theatrical" performance. But in Kahaani, the nuances of vulnerability plus determination and finally ruthlessness - perfection!

[katherine]

I had some problems with TDP as a film, I'll confess -- found it more undermining to women than it was empowering, and I think Vidya's great performance was despite a lacklustre, uneven script. I think she's much better served by the story here, and that anchors her performance beautifully.

SPOILER

I think the flashbacks are a sore point for many -- they're one example of audience manipulation for the sake of the story, and it's a fine line a director walks on when he/she does that. I think the moment I twigged as to what was going on, I remembered there was one character unaccounted for, and then all the pieces fell into place, though I had to make the decision that the flashbacks are seen through the eyes of those of us hearing Vidya's retelling of them, and not through her eyes (and this is precisely what my husband did, too, when I asked him about them). I read an excellent piece about the flashbacks, in which the writer points out that they wouldn't actually be problematic in a print version of the story, it's only in the visual medium where they are deceptive and thus manipulative. But it's kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situtation for the director -- do you leave the flashbacks out? Do you leave them in, but make the identity of the husband kind of obscure -- but that, of course, is another giveaway.

All that said, I wasn't disappointed, it was more that I wasn't surprised and the climax was merely a confirmation of what I'd puzzled out, and there's still something satisfying about that.

END SPOILER