'The Film Emotional Atyachar' (Hindi, Thriller, 2010)
Director: Akshay Shere
Cast: Ranvir Shorey, Vinay Pathak, Mohit Ahlawat, Anand Tiwari, Kalki Koechlin
Like most postmodern noir thrillers, the puzzlingly titled 'The Film Emotional Atyachar' is the bastard child of two twentieth-century aphorisms — Jean-Luc Godard’s puckish pronouncement that all films must have a beginning, a middle and an end (just not necessarily in that order), and John Lennon’s more sentimental observation that life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.
A fractured time-line narrative and the power of destiny to thwart the best-laid plans — these constitute the narrative spine of Akshay Shere’s self-conscious tale of a bag of loot that passes through numerous ill-intentioned hands before winding up by the bedside of its rightful owner.
Along the serpentine way, the storytelling stops to doff a hat to every single genre requirement — creatively gory violence (death by screwdriver), multiple-point-of-view narration, pop-culture nods (Tom and Jerry as an inspiration for murder), plenty of swearing, outrageously colourful characters with equally colourful introductions (“Bosco, a virgin Casanova”) and a cool disregard for formal narrative, which results in an engagingly trippy vibe.
Shere, to his credit, keeps his running time short (a mere hour-and-a-half) by dispensing entirely with character delineation.
We learn that Joe (Vinay Pathak, who, along with Ranvir Shorey, headlines a game cast) is a mama’s boy, or that Vikram (Mohit Ahlawat) had a grandfather from Pakistan — but these splashes of colour don’t actually accrue into portraits of these people.
And that’s how it should be — for despite the presence of “emotion” in the title, this is not the kind of film that invites identification.
This is moviemaking as game-playing, where the director throws the audience the gauntlet and we breathlessly try to keep up. I admit I was a little lost at first, with the numerous storylines and the constant cross-cutting between them (that, of course, fulfils another genre requirement, that the second time’s the charm. A repeat viewing might tell me, for instance, what those darned scorpions were about).
But once I settled into the film’s rhythms, and despite the frequent scrappiness, I must say I had fun. Just remember not to blink.