Kahaani and the Value of a Good Hindi Film

I finally watched Kahaani a couple of weekends back. Tickets had been near-impossible to get, and we were on the verge of choosing between Agent Vinod and The Hunger Games before vacancies were found in INOX some twenty minutes before the start. The movie came highly recommended from various people, so expectations were high.

And, for the most part, it delivered. There wasn't a single wasted minute in the plot, which is an achievement for a movie that clocks in more than two hours. I liked the characters as well. Vidya Balan's Ms. Bagchi is a worthy addition to an impressive body of work. The contrast between the Kolkata cop Satyaki and the fiery Intelligence Bureau Deputy Khan was neatly drawn out. Saswata Chatterjee's character, the contract killer Bob Biswas, was low on screen-time but high on impact. Satisfying is the word which comes to mind when I look back at this viewing.

Thinking about the film, the thing that interests me is that despite having been made on a low budget, it "carried" itself like a mainstream movie. It wasn't marketed as a Multiplex movie; and it wasn't self-consciously offbeat (if that makes sense). It didn't give off the vibe Johnny Gaddaar (another film which wasn't punctuated with songs) did, and it certainly didn't aspire to be an Anurag "How about I give you the finger" Kashyap-type creation. No, this was a resolutely Bollywood film, if not a conventional one.

Kahaani isn't a masterpiece. It's possible that much of its appeal simply lies in that fact that it's a bit different. If you look hard enough you should be able to pick out its flaws (as Jai Arjun and some of the comments in his post have done), and I suspect it won't appear quite so good on a repeat viewing. But it does reach a certain standard; this is the sort of movie I'd like to see our filmmakers putting out as regular fare.

I'm not really the Bollywood type; my tolerance for Hindi film excess isn't great. I am more likely to take a chance on an English movie than a Hindi one, and hence routinely end up watching average Hollywood productions while missing out on good desi stuff. Still, a good Hindi - or Tamil, or any other Indian-language - film holds more value for me than an English one, possibly because you're more likely to identify with a setting closer to your own experience (and also because, at some level, bias is inescapable). This is similar to how I feel about Indian fiction, even if our output in this sphere could be way better.

So, having encountered a lot of sources eager to point out that a movie just cannot succeed without including the necessary masala, it was nice to see a reasonably intelligent film engaging with the audience mostly on its own terms, and landing on its feet.

This is not to argue against big-budget, song-and-dance films; they are part of Bollywood's charm. Kahaani, however, is a reminder that there's room for other stuff too in the mainstream.