CANNES FILM FESTIVAL / SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL: Something of an outlier at Cannes, even in the Midnight Movies section, where its pulp-y ultra-violence (if not its gimmicky structuralism) set it apart from more austere entries, Amit Kumar’s debut feature can’t help but seem a little less remarkable away from that event. Gently ambitious, a handsomely mounted, conceit-driven take on the ever-growing genre of Mumbai-set crime thrillers, it’s also mildly successful: slickly made, and eminently watchable, but not quite the game-changer it would so clearly like to be.
In the end, however, it all feels slightly overcooked
Its opening, though, is superb: an extended set-piece wherein a limousine is blocked, in a typically narrow and teeming Mumbai street, by an ox-cart—which turns out to be less a metaphor for the nation’s new class divides, than an old-fashioned trap. With nowhere to run, and no means of escape, the car’s passenger—a wealthy property developer—is hacked to death by a local hitman, known only as The Axe Man, and barely less of a cipher than his victim.
He, in turn, is employed by a local kingpin, known—helpfully—as The Slum Lord. (You have to imagine that, even in a city as crowded as this one, a criminal who names himself after his job description would be not too difficult to find.) But the film’s real point of departure comes later—by which time idealistic young policeman Adi has witnessed his partner, hard-nosed beat cop Khan, murder two suspects in cold blood. And why not? This, he tells his young protegé, is the only true justice a legal system as flawed and a city as chaotic as theirs can hope to provide.
Adi, understandably, is shocked—but experiences his own moment of ethical truth a few days later, when, having been charged with busting one of The Slum Lord’s many extortion campaigns, he manages to corner The Axe Man in yet another no-exit alley. The assassin attempts to make his escape over a high wall; Adi draws his pistol. And time slows, suddenly, to a kind of attenuated slow-motion . . .
Spoilers follow—
The action then expands outward, to encompass three possible and separate outcomes, looping and returning after each half-hour scenario has played out, to this single, initiating incident. In the first, he hesitates—and the assassin escapes and continues to take a succession of lives, culminating finally in the murder of Adi’s own girlfriend.
In the second, he pulls the trigger, killing The Axe Man—or does he? He’s unsure if the victim actually was the suspect he sought, and eventually runs afoul of the dead man’s son, bent upon revenge.
And in the third instalment, he executes more prudent judgment: arresting the hitman and bringing him to trial. Where—in one final, delicious irony—he discovers the truth of his old partner Khan’s worldview.
Here endeth the spoilers.
There’s nothing especially subtle about either the message or the filmmaking here, which cleaves closely to the post-Tarantino school of crime fiction, and so it’s unsurprising that the ground for this device is so conspicuously well-seeded, with Adi pausing, early on, to recall how his late father told him there are always three paths in life: 'the right path, the wrong path, and the middle path.’ (His dad, you suspect, could have had a successful career advising Britain’s New Labour.) And while I’d like to believe this device derives from Kieslowski, and his classic branching-narrative feature Blind Chance, it’s more likely borrowed from Sliding Doors, which subordinated the political acumen of the former (made under martial law in Poland, and coinciding with the rise of Solidarity) for a kind of wistful, 'Ah, but what if . . . ?’ reverie.
This film pushes its points harder than that one—by the final chapter, it’s apparent that the omnipresence of corruption, not the mutability of fate, is the real subject here—but is no less deterministic or contrived. As executed, it’s extremely watchable. The director juggles each of the chapters with imagination as well as technical skill: utilising the same set of characters in each, and even replaying certain scenes entirely, allowing the altered circumstances to re-contextualise the exchanges. And the cinematography—by DoP Rajeev Ravi, who also shot Gangs of Wasseypur—manages to imbue the action (which is occasionally over-edited and confusing) with a grittily under-lit aesthetic.
In the end, however, it all feels slightly overcooked: too much technique in the service of too little actual content, rather in the manner of Danny Boyle’s recent Trance. Like that film, it’s quickly devoured, and just as quickly forgotten.
This literalism of this film’s character-names, meanwhile, also extends to its title: this is also by far the rainiest picture you’ll see this year. Like Guillermo del Toro in Pacific Rim (or countless music video directors before him), Kumar is all too aware of the graphic possibilities of a downpour, of light refracted through a hundred falling raindrops, and thus takes care to set the action in only the wettest and most sodden locations. And this, too, makes a kind of grimly methodical sense. He’s nothing if not determined, after all, to make a splash.
