Maharathi: Murder is in the Details (Zero Spoiler Review)
Rarely have I seen Bollywood dole out such measured doses. Deft execution, a perfect pitch and in a low key. Shivam Nair’s sophomore flick ‘Maharathi’ hardly qualifies as great or even memorable but it packs in moments of perfection, moments where all the elements in a frame come together and achieve an impossibly low-key crescendo that is the hallmark of a master.
‘Maharathi’ is a cold, distant film. There isn’t much to like about it, nothing to warm the cockles. As a noir it has the elements in place- intrigue, deception, murder, decadence and an almost inescapable gloom. All but passion. ‘Passion’ is an all important element in the genre, in the heat of which much blood is shed. It is the element that fuels the narrative with sexual charge and even supplies requisite even romantic reasons for ghastly crimes, cut noses and kicked-in ribs. In ‘Maharathi’, Nair replaces all hints/scope of passion with simple economic calculations. There is no innocent fall-guy. There are no innocents. Greed for money is motivation enough. Character moralities lie on the scale between rotten and despicable. The question placed to the audience is not ‘who-done-it’ but rather they are asked to join in and guess on the contemptible question of ‘how-to-get-it-done’.
At the heart of a film beats the cold-ticking of a metronome. ‘Maharathi’ is the noir for our times, a chilly foreboding distant neo-noir.
The effectiveness of ‘Maharathi’ is full credit to the subtle inventiveness of Nair and crew. It is a film clearly made on a modest even meager budget, technology and space. It’s origin from a stage play also threatens to stifle it’s success of being transferred to the big screen. Nair & Co. work around these situations shooting mostly in close-ups, edited with deliberate pacing and puncturing the claustrophobic setting with occasional departures to outside locations. Also Nair is someone gifted with the knowledge of how to employ a background score for maximum impact as was noticed in his debut ‘Aahista Aahista’ and once again he employs a jazzy, brassy typical noir soundtrack to great effect lending his precise narrative tension, occasional moments of shock and that old-school murder mystery style. He may lack the electric tangerine lights and retro jhankar that gave ‘Jhonny Gaddar’ its vibe but what he achieves within his modest means in ‘Maharathi’ is nothing short of exemplary. In this gratuitous times, where every film aspires to sensory overload, Nair’s low-key approach is most welcome especially in the scenes of violence where he places the camera’s eye away from the bloodshed but still manages to convey the impact. Even his referencing and tributes are subdued and in one of the scenes, one can quietly glance at a poster of classic noir ‘Force of Evil’ with its unfortunate star John Garfield.
The first half is almost inch perfect but the second half struggles to stay afloat and I’m pointing my finger at there culprit here. Yes, you Paresh Rawal. (Quite like Tushar mentioned in his 2008 wrap up, only more severe)His personality is too big and his antics just too familiar and his attention grabbing antics too annoying in a movie that relies and works best on understatement. About the last thing you want to be reminded of while watching a film like ‘Maharathi’ is ‘One Two Three’ and I was. Nothing could be cruder, nothing could be more disruptive. In the second half, he becomes a part of every mis-en-scene, poker-face, lame-dialogues and all and almost ruined the whole of the movie for me. I could only give up and at best, just imagine what someone like Pankaj Kapoor or a Zakir Hussain, Deepak Dobriyal even Murali Sharma would have made of it.
The rest of the cast however are uniformly excellent starting with Naseer groovy and mischievious as ever and a excellent wildly hamming snob-turn by Boman Irani who could have taught Rawal a thing or two about the darker edges of comedy. Om Puri has a walk on and is restrained, ordinary and inadvertently funny just as he is required to be and Tara Sharma surprisingly is pretty effective in her own naive waif sort of way. And the scene-stealer, surprise-surprise, and now I’m convinced of her talent, goes to that newly crowned Bollywood indie goddess, Chitrangda make way for ‘Neha Dhupia’. In a gallery of thesps she not just holds her own and etches a terrific bitchy femme fatale but as far as the femme fatales and noir is concerned, she’s stepped with electric verve into Barabara Stanwyck’s shoes or rather, anklets.
The brief coda and the dance video that immediately follows the explosive climax are not just unnecessary but downright offensive. I walked off promptly saving my consciousness from the assault and in the empty corridors of the multiplex quietly reminisced on what could be the jazziest sequence I have seen this year, this side of Melville. Naseer at a desk, Chekov’s gun close-by, the shadows obscuring his face making it look much like a cunning, wicked wolf, the soundtrack picking up the whiskey smooth bebop flow…………………………….
It kicked, ladies and gentleman. Kicked like jazz.
(pics by wikipedia, iloveindia)
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Finally!
certainly, we are getting bored of paresh rawal with his doses of over acting which he is not capably of laying off
i hve heard the movie script has a lot of loop holes.
I love Nair Films.
BTW, wtf is ‘i love india’, is it the Nair love funk?
The jazz(John Coltrane) is fun.
I love India was about the only place where i found a decent ‘Maharathi’ poster and they had surprisingly early review but no Shivan love man.. it’s been a Rawal fest till now. I just don’t get it!
@Bharat Bhushan.. you’ve heard, have you?
The movie was a complete letdown
i saw ‘Maharathi” yesterday.I found it good and engaging.It is a good thriller in long time.
I do not know why all reviews(in popular sites) are finding it slow paced.
After OLLO, Paresh Raval gives yet another excellent performance.
@ Siddharth-I could hve given the details of the loopholes.But i did nt want to be a spoiler!
Excellent.. that’s the Maharathi way! :-)
LOL, you guys!
Good one, but why Paresh is thrown to the stable??