Sriram Raghavan’s Film is Frustrating but Rewarding

The entire hour goes by in conversations where their wrangled lives are wringed into patches of dialogues. The film’s scaffolding is entirely built on these conversations, explaining their pasts to each other — and us. So, when Maria tells Albert about her daughter’s father, she also clarifies that she is talking about her husband. (He’s shacking up with some girlfriend in Orlem.) When Albert comes back home, to his mother’s apartment, his neighbour keeps trying to make us understand the context of Albert’s return — that his mother died, that the neighbour used to read Albert’s letters aloud to his mother as her sight was failing in her final days. This verbosity is exhausting because it has neither the unfussy texture of wit, or pith. It comes out of an insecurity to be understood, to have as much of the film be clear as possible in that moment, since most of it will only make sense once it “clicks”. 

There is a fetishising of logic at play here. But even the incongruities of their stories don’t really tick anything — Albert keeps saying he is coming from Dubai, then why do we see him getting off from a train station, for example? This is because nothing feels diabolical about the lies they might be telling each other. Their unreliable nature is instead, lodged in background score that tingles, and the opaque performances of both Kaif and Sethupathi — an opacity that can be mistaken for mysteriousness, but is often an inability to reach the surface of expression. Let me explain this posture of mine because I struggled with their performances. Sethupathi has mastered the poker face, the kind of translucence in expression that expects you to give it meaning, and watching it being doled out film after film makes it lose its charm. Kaif, on the other hand, is not able to milk that instability of her character. You realise that most of what she is doing in the first half is a carefully calibrated performance, that its artifice is intentional. And yet, within that artifice you are not able to locate the pockets of sincerity — her love for her daughter, for example, never feels true, always on the brink of being exposed as a performance, too. This is something Tabu, for example, provided a roadmap for, in Andhadhun, where you can locate the strange moments of pain in her devilish designs. The film also makes a strange decision of holding such tight close-ups of Kaif, and it is unnerving because the lacking movement, the smooth alabaster skin, the garrulous intensity of the dialogue, all cannot hold together. 

Slow, but Necessary Worldbuilding

The thing about characters whose lives are sketched through narration and not dialogues, through summaries and not symphonies, is that they never seem like characters, but merely a sedimentation of stories. Raghavan takes his time establishing the geography of the place, of South Bombay — not Mumbai, this is pre-1996  — and their respective houses. Architecture plays an important role, because there is a dead body, and the location of the dead body in the apartment is of essence — not immediately apparent, but within a few steps. A fire escape proves crucial. With his cinematographer Madhu Neelakandan, Raghavan revels in long shots of Albert folding paper into origami swans, or even Albert and Maria dancing, a dance that is both sweet but also haunting because it seems out of character for both. You realise, much later, that the first hour burning in the ennui of these strange, staged interactions was actually giving you a chance to revel in the architecture of the place, its precision, its middle-class hoarding — all those tchotchkes and photographs and irrelevant prints — and the lift that tumbles slowly. (This, too, proves crucial.)