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Revisit No Smoking!
[I thought to start my posting at PFC with a review of No Smoking – Kashyap is a well-known figure here; but also because in a recent post he bemoans how people don’t get his film].
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The protagonist of No Smoking, K (John Abraham, in a namesake role as Franz Kafka’s protagonist in The Trial) is a smoker who refuses to give up. His family and friends try every means to get him off it while he cannot see what the fuss is all about. However, when his wife (Ayesha Takia) threatens to leave him for good, he agrees to get help from one Baba Bengali (Paresh Rawal), referred to him by his best friend (Ranvir Shorey). Baba Bengali runs an underground quit smoking laboratory, and once caught in his scheme of things, life becomes a nightmare for K. K’s surreal journey from there on defies logic, and the world, with all its friends and foes, seems to be closing in on him. Baba Bengali spells out a series of brutal rules, on what punishment K will be given for every cigarette he smokes. With the all-seeing, policing eyes on him, K has nowhere to hide and take his daily dose of cigarette. He tries to run away, even retaliate, but he doesn’t have a chance. The paranoia and the frustration splits K’s consciousness. And finally even his soul is taken away, just like Baba Bengali had warned.
K’s exasperation, confusion and desperation will be delightfully familiar to those who have ever smoked. However, it may also be frustrating for an audience if No Smoking is seen as just series of plots aimed at making K quit his habit of smoking. On a thematic level, No Smoking is an absurdist’s view of the Universe. The film showcases a universe where nothing is what it seems, where the idea of freedom is illusory, where the boundary between real and imaginary has collapsed, where family threatens, friends betray, society abandons, and one’s own memory plays tricks. Man here is a trapped animal. He can run to Siberia or stand in the middle of Nowhere, he is still being watched and his actions monitored. He would be a fool to think he can choose. He can control his life no more than Hemingway’s ants. It’s Man against Institutions and however much he may try he will not win, for the rules of this game are inherently tyrannical and loaded.
K’s smoking may be an unhealthy habit, but it is also an act of choice, an assertion of independence. His journey from resistance to partial or forced conformism is also a revelation of how the oppressive institutions and rules of society leave no space for individual choice. His family uses emotional arm-twisting to force him to come around their way, his friends hide behind masks of concern and goodwill to ensnare him, and religion persuades him with promises of salvation or threats of damnation into giving up his independence.
In this absurdist’s universe, language too has lost its meaning. Communication is difficult, with the result that what one says doesn’t need to be true, and what one really feels, one cannot say. K and his wife speak to each other in expletives and often in internal monosyllables that appears over their head as text in comic-book balloons! K’s brother, J speaks to him in German, and Baba uses a deceptive and religious phraseology K cannot decrypt. The alienation is complete – the world thinks K is crazy, K thinks the world has gone nuts. No Smoking ends poignantly, showing how the institutional and societal processes eke out the souls from human bodies, and they’re left dummies conforming to the existing rules. To further its point on brutality of these processes, the film shows that it is not the ‘sin’ of smoking that killed our rebel-hero, K’s soul; K’s soul is instead forcefully gas-chambered by Baba’s religious cleansing squad.
John Abraham as K and Paresh Rawal as Bengali Baba give convincing performances. The art and camerawork successfully create the surreal and smoky atmosphere so essential for this film. The photography by Rajeev Ravi is first-rate and the framing imaginative. There is excellent production design by Wasiq Khan (Baba Bengali’s underground laboratory , the call centers, canister-filled alleys, execution chambers, and police interrogation booths remind one of the set pieces from Terry Gilliam’s apocalyptic films like Brazil [1985] and Twelve Monkeys [1995]). The film is supported by well-composed songs. However, the lyrics could have been used to shore up the thematic aspect of the film; presently they work only at the literal level of the narrative.
No Smoking does not fit any popular film genre produced in Bombay. What complicates the reading of the film is it’s inaccessibility. For narratives that work on two levels- literal and symbolic- it is essential that both work independently. That is, the smoker’s story should be strong enough to work on its own without the support of the absurdist interpretation, and vice versa. However, in No Smoking the two often get mixed up, so the smoker’s story gets surreal at times where as human condition, supposed to look meaningless, occasionally acquires meaning! Also, Kashyap should have made use of topical allusions for the audience to relate to the film better. Contemporary and recognizable issues could also have greatly improved the narrative’s accessibility of No Smoking (for example, Kafka and Beckett texts contain references to the oppressive police state).
Nonetheless, this is not a film that can be written off, though some reviewers will try. Try they will, for, often, incomprehension leads to rejection. Anurag Kashyap’s achievement lies in refusing to compromise (making the film’s subject even more apt) and in creating what he believed in. And for helping him produce this novel work, the entire team of No Smoking should be congratulated.
Padmaja Thakore
17 Responses to “Revisit No Smoking!”
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This is exactly how i interpreted the movie…
Then next weeks later i went to see Om Shanti Om…
Now after seeing No Smoking if you go and see OSO….
U ll feel like K….OSO proves that money can’t buy taste…i felt depressed but at the same time happy..
There was this movie ‘Primer’ (2004)…i really liked it…
This movie was made on a budget of $7000 !!..
Really..you should see that movie…it proves that all this glamour & all doesnt make great movies.
Hey…why most of the mainstream film critics not even interpret the movie? are they that dumb? or they weren’t paid to think?
(Thank you!)
Om Shanti Om deserves a review. On its way!
@Tushar… They are both dumb and not bribed :D Most of the so-called critics are self-proclaimed one.
Nice one padmaja.
kuch critics toh kiraaye ke tattu hai…
badhiya. wld like to read more from you……
k
I was going through Roger ebert’s review of Primer…where he writes at the end
“The movie delights me with its cocky confidence that the audience can keep up. “Primer” is a film for nerds, geeks, brainiacs, Academic Decathlon winners, programmers, philosophers and the kinds of people who have made it this far into the review. It will surely be hated by those who “go to the movies to be entertained,” and embraced and debated by others, who will find it entertains the parts the others do not reach. It is maddening, fascinating and completely successful”
I guess the same can be said about NoSmoking.
I agree with Tushar007, ‘Primer’ is an excellent movie, a must watch. The home grown special effects are awesome. Most them are simple to create using a camcorder and some image/video processing. But the beauty is in the way it has been visualized. Who said Engineers aren’t artiste?
I strongly recommend ‘Pi’ by Daron Aronofsky. I think it is better than Aronofsky’s ‘Fountain’. The black and white imagery never looked so expressive before.
I was listening to the song ‘main khuda’ from “Paanch”. I think the lyrics in the song has the seed of the story of ‘NO Smoking’. Am I the only one who feels that way?
I have been visiting the PFC for a couple of weeks now. I have just one thing to say to Oz & co. “Thank you” for creating and maintaining PFC. By being a part of PFC, I feel close to the undergoing revolution in Indian Cinema (yes, I think so).
NS was more of an experience than a film.. ..this one will go down in history as a cult classic ….The songs are good as well …i dont agree that the lyrics are not up to the mark ..i liked the lyrics specialy ash tray its damn good….
[[ Na haath dalo
na haath dalo
ki waqt se chile hue lamho ki raakh garm hai
Waqt se chile hue lamhoki raakh garm hai
Ungliya jalegi
Ye ash tray puri bhar gayee hai ]] ..love that …
Hey padmaja, welcome on PFC, have been reading your blogs and read your review too earlier.. thanks..
What is heartening in this country is that most of the Hindi heartbelt reviewers and critics have understood and appreciated no smoking.. ajay bramhatmaj, nd now i read dhirendra asthana’s review in rashtriya sahara where he saw reference to krishna baldev vaid, and vinod kumar shukl and gajanan madhav muktibodh and if nothing that atleast shows i wasn’t alienating the hindi belt.. and also the review in rajasthan patrika..
vikrant..yes the seeds of NS is in main khuda last antara..
hey Anurag ..
i read somewhere that you are planning a film with saif ali khan …is it true ??
Padmaja,
chal chod na apne regular critics ko… NS or for that matter any good film is about the way its crafted irrespective of the fact that the critics (if at all they exist in India) like it or not. I think these breed is getting more importance than they deserve. and more than criticising the film I have always observed that they are more interested in the write up which they think will make an impact on the readers mind but 99% of the times it has failed…
One only feels bad for the obvious biases these critics harbour towards certain filmmakers.
Padmaja, you wrote that K thought he was a fool to think he could make choices. I interpreted that differently.
It felt to me like K did make his choice — to quit smoking — but he did not realize this choice would set into motion much larger consequences than he expected. It was like he made a minor miscalculation, but the response by everyone around him was so devastating as to be surreal.
For example, there were a lot of (loose) fingers pointing at K’s so-called friends who were quick to take advantage of his situation when he was down. This is something anyone would find disorienting, as if everything you thought was true no longer is.
And society did not take his soul away, but rather he lost his soul by making a choice to fit into society — or at least to keep the companionship of his cute wife.
Thanks for writing such a thought-provoking review!
A really good review and insightful in writing. Wow!
“Incomprehension leads to rejection” - Touche
I felt exactly the same thing when I saw the media tirade against the film. I expressed similar views on my blog as well.
http://urgetofly.blogspirit.com/archive/2007/10/31/no-smoking-review.html
But. But, there is another take on this. Incomprehension leads to appeciation….if one can’t understand something it must be great, that’s a belief among some people.
I’m still wondering if I belong to the latter type and liked No Smoking because it was “incompehensible” in many parts ;)
Reading the review and all these comments makes me think that i have no brains at all coz frankly speaking NS appeared to me total crap
and OSO was a much better movie than NS
thanx a lot padmaja…..
u r the 1st person who is atleast able to explain that what was the story of the movie “no smoking”..i am a hindi speaking indian…who luckily has done a bit of theater so understands a bit what…brecht,kafka,alienation,theater of absurd are..but what about all others who don’t even have a hint of these terms,please understand that they paid for entertainment..not for a sar dard………if people like you still keep on pating mr anurag kashyap for such a kuda work..will he ever try to make a movie for the common man….??? ,i don’t think that he will even try to do so & hence will remain a film maker only in the festival & multiplex circuit…
to,
mr anurag kashyap
dude you did such hard labour for the tali but you are facing the gali so why not take it grace fully, becouse it was a real bad work where you were not even able to communicate to the people what you wanted to…{its peoples art after all}…i my self trying to make short movies but they are made on my kharcha & are meant for me & my friends .they are all part of my learning process…so no scope for me getting humiliated in public…atleast for now..till i also get a public release & hence subject to such public bashing.its my humble request, plzzz dont try to find solace in this virtual world of blogs…infact come out in the public say that you commited a blunder & next time try making a movie where atleast the story is clear to the janta ..atleast.bhaiya galati hoo gai to man lo na koi phansi to mil nahin jayegi…
cheers to the passion of cinema
arvind shandilya
aur ho sake to mere 190 rupaee wapass kar dena {this is what i paid to cinemax versova}taki main aapki agli film black main ticket le ke dekh sakunnn