Reality. Is it the material of the senses? Then what about the sub-conscience, the soul, the cryptic patterns of the sensory world locked deep inside that dictate the manner in which one experiences the world around. One man’s darkness is another’s light. Then what infact does one call it- darkness or light? What is reality then? The senses, the soul or somewhere in the sum total of it all.

Anurag Kashyap’s enigmatic mindbender ‘No Smoking’ opens with a panorama of an icy blue where the endless horizon blurs the difference between the earth and the sky. A telephone rings and protagonist K awakens to answer a phone call from his wife. He’s in a decrepit wooden cabin with a bottle of vodka and a flickering TV alternating between static and news. The newsreader on the television has her lips pursed but strangely, the audio rattles on in Russian. A war of some sort is on, we learn from the clips. Outside his window, K can observe the same scenes of war and curfew. He looks back at the television to find himself on it. Unnerved, now K needs a cigarette. He paces around thinking in comic speech bubbles. He follows the signs. Maybe they’ll help. But no cigarette. Just a mysterious Russian soldier and a gunshot. On an impulse he decides to make a run for it like a bat out of hell. Smashing the windows, running across the snow and a soldier with a vintage American gangster machine gun giving him the chase, he finds himself drawn to a lone and absurd bathtub on the snowy planes where packets of his favorite brand lie nearby. He lunges for the packets and stuffs himself with cigarettes only to discover that he has no matches on him. Maybe the soldier has some.

Dishkyaon!

K rises from the bathtub, safe and secure in his plush residence. Promptly pops a cigarette as his wife asks him if he had once again been to Siberia and a doctor advises him to quit his cigarettes because it seems that his addiction has marked his sub-conscience. It has become an essential part of him, of his soul.

It’s a stylistically awkward but yet tremendous opening not only in that the director establishes the bizarre texture of the film dictated by the logic of the dreams- displacement, condensation and cigarette (fetish) but also it emolliates one’s greatest fear about the film- the performance of John Abraham. He’s smooth, composed and while he may miss a couple of beats trying to channel De Niro, comes up aces.

As the narrative moves ahead tying to set up the principal characters it gets into a rhythm which is sometimes erratic and knee-jerk but nonetheless it more or less always delivers. K is a character that runs on cigarettes and an automatic superego. Narcissistic and vile, a corporate climber who has climbed it all and likes to believe he dictates the world around as it revolves with him as the center, the absolute master of his reality. His ego and his addiction, hardly any difference between the two as one feeds on the other, have fractured his relationships with his wife and his asthmatic brother. He receives the same advice from one and all- “quit smoking” but takes the criticism one puff after the other with the sheer glee of confounding them. “Nobody tells me what to do.”

K’s descent into the mouth of madness is set into motion by friend Abbas Tyrewallah who paradoxically was also the one who initiated him to cigarettes. Abbas, once a chain smoker, has recently married and has come out cured of his addiction from the Prayogshala, a rehabilitation center if one were to believe him. But from the moment he steps on screen, there is something odious and creepy about him. It is apparent he is scarred and shaken not just physically but also psychologically. Also pointing him towards the Prayogshala is the doctor treating his brother’s asthma. After much initial resistance K finally gives in when his wife threatens divorce and one would believe he does so just to avoid the hefty alimony.

As K moves towards the Prayogshala it is as if the world is closing in on him. The absurd black comedy of addiction moves into the realm of dystopia and fear. Colors begin to burn like in a fever dream, the soundtrack bursts into strange distortion, rot and decay fill the scenes as shriveled shadows of people stand around like ominous blank-eyed gargoyles direct K deeper down the spiral to what will turn to be his future hell.

The Prayogshala sequence is undoubtedly the standout set piece of the movie. Even as K enters the corridor there is a presence of the otherworldly. Reality has already started to come apart. Once inside, among henchmen who seem like they belong to religious cult and mysterious screams, arrives the deliriously named Shri Shri Guru Ghantal Baba Bengali Sealdah Walleh, who makes his entry without fuss, fire or fog, but with sheer fanaticism mixed with understated malice, rises as the Mephistopheles character. In a Faustian barter, he promises redemption but at the price of your soul. Good intentions have never soured like the Baba Bengali’s. K’s attempts to resist and escape are in vain as he finds himself trapped in the mysterious labyrinth of the Prayogshala where every turn leads him back to the Bengali. His only escape is to sign the contract which abides that something evil and ghastly will befall him if he is ever in the presence of a cigarette.

Dreams burn into reality and the sub-conscience burns into the senses. The rest of the movie involves K, in true Kafka style, trying to understand the strange and incomprehensible system of which he is now a participant and maybe even escape with his life. But, the question that director Kashyap asks is- is it enough that he escapes only with life? What of the soul?

The one aspect that the makers of ‘No Smoking’ are going to town with is that it is a film on the ill-effects of smoking. Yeah right! And Bob Dylan’s Rainy Day Woman (Everybody must get stoned…) is about picking up stones and pelting them.

Superficially the movie may seem to be a shocking depiction of addiction and withdrawal that follows a common template for a horror flick, but deep down it ponders on the very philosophical issue that concerned ‘A Clockwork Orange.’ What is the notion of a ‘human being’? When K places his palm on the touch-screen at the Prayogshala the data arrives as ‘Species: Homo Sapiens’. The soul is disregarded. The nightmare of K is not one of addiction but of social dystopia. The Holocaust is invoked and Baba Bengali is shown in photograph sharing space with Hitler. Bengali’s appellation of ‘Shri Shri’ and the paranoid fervor with his inmates later spread his word are all an indictment of a system that runs on herd mentality. Baba’s methodology for curing addiction is a bloodlust driven by fanaticism. There is little to distinguish between him and a religious fundamentalist. It is like Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night- ‘True evil is hating someone and believing that God in on your side.’ Director Kashyap cheekily but furiously lashes out these extremist systems which require one and all to conform, submit and reject absolutely anything that is beyond. And reading his posts here on PFC it is easy to see why.

It’s a classic piece of misdirection. K is a bully-headstrong and mean but when he says ‘Nobody tells me what to do’… he is delivering a statement of no small magnitude or purpose.

In terms of pure style, ‘No Smoking’ is in overdrive. Rajiv Rai first tracks the urban landscape with clinical precision but with K slipping down the spiral, the frames seem more and more hallucinatory. The art design and editing lend vertigo and paranoia to the visuals as Vishal Bharadwaj’s superbly employed soundtrack amplifies the dream-reality trip. Among performances, apart from John’s class act there is a grand guignol performance of theatrical menace from Paresh Rawal who revels in his role. Ayesha Takia is a bit too cosmetic both as the wife and as the doppelganger fetishistic secretary while Ranvir plays it creepy and cold as Abbas and conveys a genuine uneasiness. If the movie has a shortcoming it would be the constant change in tone and rhythm and the non-sequitur slapstick gags which would be make great DVD extras but for a movie which is delivering a great indictment at the end, it bogs it down. The same goes for the thought bubbles. But hell, on the other hand they’re reckless and tremendously fun.

Film references are flying in through the open window but these are some that really intrigued me. One is what may be three instances of tribute to the Coen Brothers- first during a sequence with a carpet, it isn’t difficult to imagine it as a tribute to ‘Big Lebowski’ after all ‘The Dude’ was first in line standing up to the system, second during the Prayogshala sequences when they begin to smart of the rotting walls of the dead end hotel in which John Turturro’s title character resides in ‘Barton Fink’ and the third is the movie’s unusual and inexplicable fascination with sunglasses which parallels the unusual and inexplicable fascination with hats in ‘Miller’s Crossing’. Also, interesting is the noir references played out in ‘the bob fosse’ during the ‘Jab Bhi Cigarette’ song sequence. Might the statue of the falcon be the Maltese Falcon- ‘the stuff that dreams are made of’

Channeling the three Davids- Fincher, Lynch and Cronenberg, director Kashyap has not only brought an absurd nightmare on screen he’s done it with purpose and élan. He strives for the right to choose, for human endeavor and he does it in style.

(Images courtesy:- Wikipedia The Human Condition, The Son of Man, Golconda, The Treachery of Images by Rene Magritte, Temptation of St. Anthony by Salvador Dali)