CINETALK

two groups of three characters each are shown interacting amongst themselves and eventually it turns out that all of them were in the same room. Or the entire hotel sequence where a drug deal goes kaput. And then, of course, the eventual coming together of all the 10 odd characters who are connected to one another.

been a master of manipulative terror. His camara range is constantly petrifying and persistently resonant. The sequences in Agyaat are ceaselessly shot in a way that suggests the presence of lethal characters and entities who we and the people on screen cannot see... only feel.

In this endeavour to evoke ghoulish visions of omnipresent danger, Varma is vastly aided by the sound design.

Sound designers Dwarak Warrier and Leslie Fernandes go easy on the eerie sounds and beguiling banshees. Instead there are chilling eruptions of noises that you probably hear in the wilderness but don’t pay attention to as being anything remarkable.

The sound also includes snatches from Hemant Kumar Mukherjee’s immortal Kahin deep jale kahin dil from the old Bees Saal Baad.

But this is well into the new millennium. The perils of modern life such as cut-throat competitiveness often lead to the throat being literally cut.

Who knows who’s killing the film unit in Agyaat? Maybe it’s their own fears and ambitions that are killing them. And the crew’s calm cinematographer (Kali Prasad Mukherjee) finally commits suicide. The spoilt bratty superstar’s spotboy (Ishteyak) is pulled into a gruesome death even as he chants mantras to protect himself.

While in Varma’s previous comparativelytacky horror outing Phoonk, god felled the devil, in Agyaat nothing works. You are doomed in the jungle. No force can protect you.

As one member after another of the film-within-film gets eliminated, Varma

Seems

to be

spoofing Agatha Christie’s 10 Little Indians

There are dollops of tantalizing irony in the way the typical and tight hierarchy in a film unit evaporates as imminent peril puts people in perilous positions. The repressed spotboy’s outburst against

And yes, Shahid and Priyanka have a crackling on-screen chemsitry. After Kaminey, audiences would be expecting a lot from him each time.

Director Vishal Bharadwaj has redefined filmmaking with Kaminey. While making the film there was absolutely no reference

Set in Mumbai, the film is mostly shot in real locations. The director’s insistence on canning shots outdoors pays off as the backdrop becomes difficult to disentangle from the elements of this thriller.

So what one gets to see is a day in the life of two brothers who are on the run for different reasons. Guddu (Shahid) has seen a sudden marriage with Sweety, played by Priyanka Chopra who is excellent in her relatively short but meaningful and important role. He is now being followed by Sweety’s brother (Amol Gupte).

Charlie (Shahid) has got hold of drugs worth Rs.10 crore and is now all set to sell them off to fulfil his long cherished dreams.

And in between, there are cops, gangsters, international drug mafia, narcotics department, a ‘Jai Maharashtra’ slogan-raising brother, an over-’coked’ friend and his two mad Bengali brothers -- all of whom make sure that Kaminey turns out to be one joyride that keeps the excitement on till the credits start rolling.

The film starts off decently though one has to concentrate hard to get the point of the narrative. All of that starts making sense after 30 odd minutes, but you still feel that there could have been a little more meat to the proceedings.

However, the post interval portions make Kaminey simply irresistible. Layer after layer unfolds, dark as well as humane side of people are put on display the spoilt superstar played by Gautam Rode, every inch the despicable brat, is a masterly manoeuvre designed to show how fear melts all class differences.

Portions of the brief supernatural whodunit are unintentionally funny. But all said and done, Agyaat gives us enough spine-chilling moments to make us wonder at the end, who the hell is killing all these people???

The grisly plot weaves in humane moments. Nitin Reddy, who makes his Bollywood debut with this film, is confident, honest and has a skilful body language. He and his assistant Sameera (Rasika Duggal) have this very believable bonding that perhaps Shah Rukh Khan and Karisma Kapoor had in Dil To Pagal Hai

Nonetheless, this unknown jungle remains chilling and ominous.

Bharadwaj, Shahid redefine filmmaking

Film: Kaminey

Director: Vishal Bharadwaj

Cast: Shahid Kapoor, Priyanka Chopra, Amol Gupte, Chandan Roy Sanyal, Tenzing Nima, Shiv Subrahmanyam, Hrishikesh Joshi point for Bharadwaj, at least not in Bollywood cinema. He picked from Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino brands of cinema and adapted it perfectly to a Bollywood milieu.

In Kaminey, Shahid Kapoor has dared to pick a subject which would have looked impossible to execute when read on paper. With his outstanding performance in the film, Shahid joins the list of top actors like Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan and Hrithik Roshan.

Bharadwaj takes his audience into a world that has perhaps never been explored before on Indian screen. He keeps introducing characters for the first 30 minutes while making sure that the twin brothers (Shahid) aren’t brought together in a single frame till way past the interval.

He also confuses his audience on purpose in at least a couple of sequences and tests their intelligence. There’s the scene where and finally comes an explosive climax that pretty much justifies the route that Bharadwaj takes in Kaminey

After watching the film, the first question that comes to mind is, ‘Why was the ‘A’ certificate?’

Kaminey is one of the few must-watch films of 2009. From narrative to execution, Bharadwaj shows that he knows the art of creating a new world of cinema and lays out a road ahead for many aspiring filmmakers. IANS

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