Talaash

Talaash

The rumors had traces of truth.  Reema Kagti and Aamir Khan had every reason to worry about KAHAANI. The Vidya Balan-Sujoy Ghosh film is a far superior suspense thriller and a classic in comparison with TALAASH in terms of ideation, screenplay, performances, and cinematic value.

It also cost just a fraction of the production budget of TALAASH that would have been rated as a ‘B’ grade comedy-mystery-thriller of little consequence but for its ‘A’ list star power. Vikram Bhatt could have churned out a dozen potboilers with little known actors with the time, money, and effort spent in developing and producing this film. It is a criminal waste of precious star power like all those extravagantly produced star-studded small films by top-line production houses in recent times.

An accident happens in the dead of the night on some Mumbai waterfront road. A speeding car suddenly takes a 90-degree turn and plunges into the sea.  A film star Armaan Kapoor (Vivan Bhatena) dies. He was the lone occupant of the car. Newly posted Inspector Surjan Singh Shekhawat aka Suri (Aamir Khan) investigates the case.

 Suri has a tragic past. His son died by drowning in a lake. He blames himself for that and presumes that his wife Roshni (Rani Mukerji) also thinks that way. He blames himself for her depression as well. The fact is she is not as depressed as he thinks. She wants to forget the past and get going with life if Suri can do the same. Suri cannot. The past haunts him. He cannot even sleep. He carries a permanent scowl and is extremely intense. The enormous burden of his character’s guilt and delivering a record-breaking box-office hit has been taking its toll on him.

The police led by Suri treat the accidental death as a case of premeditated murder apparently because the dead star’s wife has filed an FIR. In the process Suri discovers that a pimp was blackmailing Armaan Kapoor. The pimp is shot dead by a hired sharpshooter. His lackey and man Friday langda Tehmur (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) finds out from his discarded SIM card the number of the guy he was blackmailing. Tehmur also discovers a DVD recording with damning evidence and decides to blackmail the guy. He gets killed too.

In the mean time Suri has befriended Rosy (Kareena Kapoor), an intriguing and mysterious streetwalker. She gives him useful tips in solving the case. Her presence is quite soporific. She moves her magic fingers in Suri’s hair, and he falls asleep. In the mean time Suri’s wife has been talking to their dead son through planchette sessions with her padosan Frenny (Shernaz Patel). This upsets Suri. He does not believe in such things. 

You are taken through all this Hitchcockian McGuffins to a shocking denouement. That was the whole purpose of the film – to make you feel stupid. Look, how smart we are? You kept guessing and we surprised you. We also misled you by spreading lies about the film’s climax and made you believe Aamir was the killer. We got you.

Unfortunately for the filmmakers, it does not exactly produce the intended result thanks to what precedes the shock treatment. It is lackluster, disjointed, convoluted and tiresome with two pointless murders thrown in as a failed attempt to intensify the proceedings. Aamir’s role of the forever tormented soul Suri acts as an additional drag and dampener.

An almost dead and disinterested audience is subjected to the supposedly awesome and incredible moment that is more like ‘khoda pahad, nikla chooha’. They come to watch an Aamir Khan film, expecting something much more substantial than this. What they get is a dreary uneven tale with very little substance and cinematic merit. Films like RAAZ 3 offer them better chills and thrills with ample doses of far more juicier and dramatic stuff.

It’s a poorly written, structured, directed, and edited film. The writers and director have invested all their creative energies in inventing their one line idea to convince their big star and have failed to develop it into a taut script for a big canvass film that could do justice to its budget and the star-cast. There are no memorable moments here. Its photography is good in patches, which is deplorable for a big Indian film of this kind. The low budget KAHAANI was much better shot. There are two dialogue writers in the film – Farhan Akhtar and Anurag Kashyap. Both of them need to hone their Hindi writing skills a little more.

With so many new age geniuses involved with the project, one expected the film to turn out a benchmark of the genre. It is not. They had great Indian classics of the genre to emulate. They have even been dropping names in their interviews unabashedly. What happened to our sense of personal integrity? Is filmmaking all about hype and marketing and hustling people into cinema halls by hook or crook?