20140205: Drama Review--Kahaani

Kahaani

1. Fundamentals, reception.
1. Indian live action feature length film, 2012, NR, 122 minutes, thriller, drama.
2. IMDB: 8.3/10.0 from 21,645 audience ratings. Spoken languages are Hindi and Bengali; subtitles in English.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 'No score yet,' 89% liked it from 1,138 audience ratings.
4. Netflix: 4.1/5.0 from 88,311 audience ratings.
5. Written and directed by: Sujoy Ghosh.
6. Starring: Vidya Balan as Vidya Venkatesan, Parambrata Chatterjee as Inspector Satyaki Sinha aka Rana, Indraneil Sengupta as Arnab Bagchi/Milan Damji, Colleen Blanch as Agnes D'Mello, Nawazuddin Siddiqui as Mr. Khan, Saswata Chatterjee as Bob Biswas.


2. Setup and Plot
1. The film opens with some experiments on rats.  Looks like nerve gas.  Soon thereafter, there is a mass death on a train when a vial of the stuff is broken in one of the cars.  End segment.


2. Vidya travels from London, UK to Kolkata, West Bengal, IN to find her husband.  He talked to her everyday since he left London, up until about two weeks previous.


3. At the first the police have no idea.  The place where he worked claimed he worked says they made no assignments for him, and he did not report to them.  The police suggest a body; she does not recognise it.  She and the police go to where his uncle lived, but no one will say that they know of him.  They get the same sort of response at the school where he did his studies in youth.  The cops investigate the airline records; no one of his name left London nor arrived in Kolkata on the given dates.


4. Vidya reached out to Agnes, who does some digging, but finds locked files.  Oi.  She remembers a man with another name (Milan Damji) who looked just like Vidya's picture of her husband.  Soon thereafter, Agnes is murdered.  A police official (Khan) who is targeting the company NDC interviews her about her relationship to Agnes.  The experiments at the beginning of the film were done at NDC.


5. Khan and his boss reach out to outlier intelligence personnel to solve the crime of the rail attack.  The bad guys attempt to scare Vidya with a visit from the man who assassinated Agnes.  Vidya and Rana continue to investigate her husband's real movements before he disappeared.


6. Will Vidya find out the truth?  Is her husband still alive?  Will the miscreants be brought to justice?


3. Conclusions
1. One line summary: Brave pregnant woman searches for her missing husband amidst corruption.
2. Three stars of five.


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 6/10 Lots of VHS level shooting, lots of amateurish footage.


2. Sound: 8/10 Mostly fine, but some of the incidental music is annoying to say the least.


3. Acting: 7/10 Reasonable.  The is mostly a one-woman show, but the one woman is not nearly stellar enough to carry a two hour movie.  The long-suffering Parambrata Chatterjee gave a good performance, which almost counterbalanced the rotten work of Nawazuddin Siddiqui.  Saswata Chatterjee as the assassin was not very believable either.


4. Screenplay: 0/10 Absurd.  The bad guys could have defused this at many junctures with relative ease.  A single knife thrust, for instance, and no one would be left who cared enough to keep the investigation going.  So, this is PC nonsense with an unconvincing lead.  The last five minutes were the worst in that regard.