A note on Talaash’s Trio

SPOILERS LIKE YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE!

In 2001, Aamir Khan starred in Excel Entertainment’s first and, to date, most important film. Dil Chahta Hai was perhaps the defining film for the decade that followed. In its wake, countless works attempted in some measure to reconstruct the atmosphere and general imagery (and ideas) of Farhan Akhtar’s first film, which really sold a light-as-a-feather lifestyle extremely well. This isn’t to take away from Akhtar’s other achievements. His film was also a thoughtful, well-written work about relationships, and it introduced to Hindi cinema a level of technical accomplishment, or at the very least, a level of sheen it hadn’t seen before. One wouldn’t be entirely mistaken, though, in saying that its lasting impression on Hindi cinema since its release is the now very familiar image of three young men tearing up the town, having a good time, without a care in the world. This image has been repeated with some mild revision, ad nauseum, to the point where it has become emblematic of Hindi cinema’s preoccupation with disposable narratives. The image resurfaces in Excel’s new film, (also and not without some irony starring Aamir) and although it pops up very late in the narrative, it is an image that is crucial to articulating Talaash’s central concern—which actually and subversively rests with the lives and stories that exist outside the borders of Dil Chahta Hai’s seductive fantasy.

At one point towards the end of Talaash, three young men drive around Bombay in a car, at night, looking for a good time. But things are different in this car. Here, one of the three—the driver—is trashed. Here, there’s a prostitute keeping them company. Here, a thoughtless act of aggression leaves one of the boys badly injured, while the girl is in worse shape and is literally left to die on the street. A character like her and a situation like this never belonged in the same world as three guys who could otherwise be stand-ins for the trio in Dil Chahta Hai. This is a character from the margins, someone from a corner of the city that most mainstream films are unconcerned with, someone, perhaps, from an Anurag Kashyap film. And so she is expelled mercilessly, and the memory of this scene is buried. What we see in anachronistic fashion during the course of the film is actually something of a ghostly revenge tale for this earlier trauma. This ghost refuses to be discarded or buried, demanding instead the dignity of an audience, something which can only be got through a measure of haunting and retribution. The first of the trio to die—in the first act of vengeance—is a member of the film industry. Armaan Kapoor could have been anything, but Kagti makes a very overt link to the world of Hindi movies, thereby framing a revenge tale where the unheralded players on the margins of a world turn the tables on those (figuratively and literally) listed on the marquee.

Despite this marvelous subversion and its rather thoughtful construction, the ideas guiding Talaash are often more impressive than the actual film. Among many of the uneven choices here is the casting of Kareena Kapoor in the role representative of those who live on the margins. Kapoor isn’t bad here—quite the opposite—but she’s simply miscast. The domestic drama, while not exactly boring, seems extraneous at certain points, (especially with the shoehorned song interludes) and a bit weird with the psychic angle thrown in. Finally, Kagti negotiates the genre bending with very mixed results. She takes a genuine risk by conflating the film noir and the supernatural mystery, but the resulting admixture lacks focus. The tone here is often difficult to read, and not just in a way that services the central mysteries in a useful way. And yet, for all these quibbles, this is probably a movie where one’s opinion can only take shape with repeated viewings—certainly the genre and the way in which the plot unravels invites the viewer to revisit Kagti’s work. In other words, like the lives it is most concerned with, this film is not something that can be discarded or forgotten very easily.