Black Comedy
BLACKMAIL
CAST: Irrfan Khan, Kirti Kulhari, Arunoday Singh, Omi Vaidya, Pradhuman Singh, Divya Dutta
DIRECTION: AbhinayDeo.
Black comedies with their cross-cutting plot lines and humor derived from character desperation can be tricky to crack. Done well, this is the genre that leaves lasting impression. Think about Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Pulp Fiction’ or The Coen Brothers’ ‘Fargo’ and ‘The Big Lebowski’.These movies find their way intoevery film buff’s canon of modern classics. Given the seductiveness of this style of filmmaking, it has attracted its share of copycats who have dirtied the pool with their formulaic and revisionist approach. So whenever a multiple protagonist comedy with a crime at its center hits the screen, people invariably say, “It’s like Tarantino!”But even Tarantino and Coen Brothers haven’t been spared by detractors, as they have been accused of ripping off their earlier works in their lesser known offerings.
Abhinay Deo, the director of 2011’s much-loved black comedy ‘Delhi Belly’, has just released his new film, ‘Blackmail’. So does Deo play his old riffs or perform a new tune? I’m pleased to say that he finds a delicate balance. ‘Blackmail’in places reeks of ‘Delhi Belly’ but still manages to score a mean punch thanks to Irrfan Khan’s wide-eyed and effective deadpan central performance.
Dev (Irrfan Khan) is a toilet paper sales executive stuck in a thankless job and a loveless arranged marriage with wife Reena (Kirti Kulhari). He would rather spend time playing PacMan till late hours in office than go home to his wife. One day, egged by his office colleague (Pradhuman Singh), Dev decides to surprise her by going home early. But when he gets home, he’s the one getting the surprise. As he peeps into their bedroom, he spots Reena in bed with another lover (Arunoday Singh).
What does a heart broken Dev do?
He’s a meek sales executive, so Jack Lemmon-like in ‘The Apartment’ that his character, if he walks into a room where his wife’s canoodling her lover, he would rather apologize and excuse himself than violently confront them. So Dev runs away quietly.
But as he is under a pile of debt, he makes up his mind to use this new found information about his wife’s affair and in a stroke of weird genius decides to extort money from the lover by blackmailing him. But his action backfires. Without spoiling the movie, I can just hint that what starts off as a harmless blackmail scheme instigates a chain of events that circles back to Dev and he finds himself getting blackmailed in the end.
What works well in ‘Blackmail’ are the moments where Dev needs to come out of his repressed existence and improvise to escape from sticky scenarios. There’s a point where he flees a crime scene and to make himself unrecognizable strips down to his boxers and covers his face with a lingerie brand’s shopping bag. Irrfan Khan shines in the film’s fish-out-of-water scenes and he does so by keeping a straight face, thus escalating the humor.
His nuanced acting is matched by Arunoday Singh, who plays the dimwitted body-builder lover of Dev’s wife. This lover in turn is married to an alcoholic and ball-busting rich lady (Divya Dutta). Similarly, Omi Vaidya makes a comeback after a short hiatus from Hindi films as Dev’s boss who wants to teach Indians to save water by wiping their bottoms with his toilet paper. In a standout scene, Vaidya’s character announces a war against jet-sprays which he deems his product’s toughest competitor.
But director Deo’s eagerness to make Khan’s character emotionless definitely weighs on the movie’s length. The film’s runtime is 2 hours 19 minutes(nearly 30 minutes longer than the runtime of ‘Delhi Belly’) and much of the middle part is spent treading water. So it is a little slow, you could say.
But ‘Blackmail’ deserves a viewing for its quirky sensibilities and colorful characters. I don’t think it will have the same recall value as ‘Delhi Belly’.Nonetheless this black comedy scores high on originality and twisted humor.
3 stars ***
