Last night, I watched last Friday’s release Ittefaq. This movie isn’t cinematically remarkable but it’s worthy of mention because it brings back the whodunnit genre back to life in Bollywood. The last mainstream whodunnit you’ll remember was Talaash. Ittefaq is not a thriller that blows your mind off like Kahaani or A Wednesday but it does get some things right and the timing is important.
Bollywood has churned out its best thrillers in phases: first in the form of Woh Kaun Thi, Teesri Manzil etc in the 60s and 70s and later in the form of 100 days, Khiladi, Gupt, Deewangi etc in the 90s and early 2000s. This genre lost its sheen post the discovery of the easy money-minting genre of macho-and-cool-guy-gets-pretty-girl formula that Salman introduced with Wanted and Dabangg in the late 2000s.
The director who probably defined the thriller genre was Hitchcock. With bare minimum investment in sets and props, very little camera work and hardly any technology at his disposal, the genius of Hitchcock evoked thrill and horror through gems like Psycho and The Rear Window. Probably the most basic death scene in any movie: the shower killing scene in Psycho turned out to be one of the most memorable scenes in the history of cinema and only Hitchcock could have pulled it off. While Hollywood has had its current flag bearer of thriller in David Fincher (Se7en, Gone Girl, The girl with a dragon tattoo) and the mastermind of intelligent films in Christopher Nolan for quite some time, Bollywood has been struggling with it and movies like Ittefaq bring relief.
The actors act well and present cogent arguments so well that you are never sure whom to root for as an audience. The script isn’t contrived except for the last five minutes and the director makes no major mistakes. Not bad.
Can we look forward to a third phase of thrillers in Bollywood ? Only time will tell. But at the moment, anything that doesn’t have an uber cool guy doing his thang to impress that neighbourhood girl is a breath of fresh air.
Pun-ter 