This is a smart time to be a film buff. Within every week of “Paan Singh Tomar”, which should incontestably win Irrfan Khan the National Award for best actor, comes “Kahaani” during which Vidya Balan is so flawlessly resplendent that one suspects the following year’s National Award too is already reserved for her. Dirty deeds forgotten.
Playing Vidya Bagchi, a non-resident Indian (NRI) who lands in Kolkata heavily pregnant and immeasurably distressed by the disappearance of her husband, Vidya Balan doesn’t hit a single false note within the entire graph of her character’s fascinating journey.
“Kahaani” isn't a standard thrill-a-minute film a few seek for a missing person. It’s much more. Bringing a virgin vitality to the suspense drama, the film strikes a fascinating balance between realism in art and the art of courting realism, without losing the entertainment quotient.
From the instant Vidya lands in Kolkata, the colour, vibrancy, bustle and jostle which might be peculiar to Kolkata assail your senses. It’s a claustrophobic yet liberating world of intrigue and deception. A pungent flavour of tension and stress qualify the narration from frame one.
Sujoy Ghosh, whose earlier films gave us no clue of the ingenuity that he displays here with such ostensible casualness, cuts the footage with razor sharp economy, leaving no sign of the surgery focused on abandoning scenes and putting together a tale that pays homage to Hitchcock even while it tilts its topi to the detective films of Satyajit Ray.
The complexities of metropolitan life emerge in one of those bridled flurry. Within a couple of minutes of Vidya’s landing in Kolkata we all know her seek for her missing husband will not be a cake-walk. Yes, we can see this spirited woman’s pursuit of the reality to the end.
Ghosh crafts a tale of devious dynamics that don't make a song and dance in their cloak-and-dagger intentions. The narrative doesn’t whip up a lather of anxieties. Stock devices of the suspense genre are here thrown meaningfully into the Hooghly. The relevance and resonance of Vidya’s journey into the dark unrevealed bowel of India’s secret service emerge in illuminating details created in Vidya’s character which add up finally to a jigsaw where not a single piece is out of place.
The end-game, shot in a good looking eruption of Durga Puja’s compelling colours, is so unexpected, it's guaranteed to leave even essentially the most diehard cynics with a way of satiated suspense.
Indeed so clever is the writing and so stunning yet convincing the denouement that one was persuaded into wondering whether Sujoy Ghosh filched the fabric from some unidentifiable source.
While it'd be criminal to offer away any of the plot details it'd be within the scope of permissible praise to mention the writing is obviously not meant to strew red herrings in our way. As we return to the film, on the end we see every detail, every twist and switch within the plot was meant to be a coherent pointer to the whole picture.
Ghosh’s masterful story-telling leaves no room to doubt the existence of a slightly unforgiving God who charts a seemingly cruel destiny for the unsuspecting individual.
Vidya’s portrayal of grace stressed is so measured and skilled, one every now and then wonders if she was actually watching herself perform from a distance to verify she didn’t take her character’s distress into the dominion of melodrama.
Vidya Balan has splendid support from actors who merge into the Kolkatan conundrum with the seamless inevitability of people that accept extraordinary circumstances as a part of life’s ordinary patterns.
Impressive in his own right is Parambrata Chattopadhyay as Vidya’s pillar of support from within an institution that insists on throwing her off the track.
Parambrata plays his gentle character with such tender affection that you just start to believe goodness isn't an extinct commodity.
Nawazuddin Sidiqqui, that brilliant actor from Kabir Khan’s “New York” and last week’s “Paan Singh Tomar”, brings a steely-sharp ruthlessness to his investigative officer’s role.
In one in every of Vidya’s best sequences where she quietly tells him to maintain his menacing advice to himself, Nawazuddin steps back to let the woman have her moment of glory, unhampered.
Vidya Balan takes centrestage with great skill and restrained pride. Her laughter of joy when she bonds with the chai-wallah kid (Ritobroto Mukherjee) and her final breakdown sequence bring her as regards to the cathartic emotions that Shabana Azmi displays.
Vidya displays an extraordinary understanding of her character’s exacerbated emotional and physical state. Luckily for her, her co-actors display no outward or inward signs of insecurity in playing roles which are designed to be supremely supportive.
Veteran Bengali actors unknown to Bollywood, similar to Saswata Mukherjee as a hired assassin and Kharaj Mukherjee as a kindly podgy cop, refill the sides of the excellent lucid portrait of a lady with a mission, without crowding the canvas.
“Kahaani” is a type of rare films that may easily lay claim to being a game-changer. And yet the narrative makes no claims. The destiny of the protagonist is charted in a breathless sweep of urgently persuasive episodes that tumble out as if God wrote Vidya Bagchi’s screenplay.
Enthralling, absorbing and tasty the narrative never resorts to italicized emotions to get our attention. We're hooked unconditionally from scene one. We surrender to Vidya’s journey. She gives us no choice. – IANS
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