'Shaitan' (Hindi)
Director: Bejoy Nambiar
Cast: Rajeev Khandelwal, Kalki Koechlin, Neil Bhoopalam, Shiv Pandit, Kirti Kulhari and Gulshan Devaiah
Bejoy Nambiar’s ‘Shaitan’ has been raising eyebrows ever since its Rorschach blot of a poster first released. The psychedelia fueled, Kannadasan-referencing trailer raised our expectations from the film. It became obvious that the film would explore the shenanigans of a youth that knows no want, but would it be more?
Would it be concerned with matters more than style or had we already seen everything that would differentiate the film from its peers? These were the questions in my mind as I stepped into a theatre showing the film.
As the film slowly percolates through my mind, the answers I am left with, after the style has been filtered, are less than satisfactory. ‘Shaitan’ introduces us to its individual characters with few preliminaries. Amrita Jaishankar (Kalki Koechlin) is the new rich kid in town and she brings with her a lot of baggage, though not of the variety manufactured by Samsonite. Having already lost her mother to insanity, she fears she may also be losing her father to her stepmother. Into her walled off life waltz a band of bacchanalian revelers who promise trust and friendship.
The group consists of small-time model, Tanya (Kirti Kulhari), video game obsessed rich boy, Zubin (Neil Bhoopalam), and a waiter who doubles as a drug pusher, Dash (Shiv Pandit). The spliced-together moments that introduce each member of this group to us, offers no explanation as to how the youngsters gravitated to each other, except for the maniacal charm of its alpha dog, Karan Chaudhury (Gulshan Devaiya in what might become a career defining role), KC for short.
The disparities in affection and economic strata that drive the dynamics of such a group are all subtly woven into its interactions. Yet the amoral bubble that surrounds these five youngsters ensures that we remain always on the outside looking in. The image of a young Amrita separated from her straitjacketed mother by shatterproof glass foreshadows the problem with ‘Shaitan’ — the sense of separation that we, the audience, feel from the characters that inhabit the amoral asylum that is Bejoy Nambiar’s universe.
The story of Arvind Mathur (Rajiv Khandelwal proving once again, after ‘Aamir’, that he is a reliable performer) provides a contrasting perspective; he is a cop struggling to hold on to his moral center in a world rife with decay. The exploitation of women, in particular, incites a blinding rage in the man (we first see him after he has just meted out vigilante justice to a sexual offender).
Ironically, Arvind is on the brink of losing, in addition to his job, his wife. Again we are offered no reasons for their mutual discontent, except the insinuation that they come from different worlds and maybe a difference of opinion on Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’. It is, however, not impossible to imagine the corrosive effect his simmering rage may have had on the marriage.
These two worlds, one filled with drug-induced debauchery and the other filled with the frustration of moral certitude, collide when the pentad of friends perpetrate a hit and run on the streets of Mumbai. When a corrupt cop (‘Love Sex Aur Dhokha’s Raj Kumar Yadav) decides to blackmail the group instead of presenting them before the law, the wheels on the friendship, and the film, slowly begin fall off.
Arvind Mathur reminds one of Anant Velankar and this makes us root for him despite his foibles. This is more than can be said for the group of youngsters in the film. They dispel their ennui through methods possibly learnt from their suburban counterparts in America — through sexually-charged games of spin the bottle and cough syrup abuse.
At some level, they are all broken children, but the film offers little to identify the source of their discontent. Their lack of a moral compass is the only defense offered for in their favor over the length of the film and this is no defense at all. So, after reels and reels of slow motion shots and incidental corpses, the vapidity of it all begins to irk.
‘Shaitan’ is, at times, so insular that it drives away those attempting to actively engage its characters. The distance enables us to appreciate its aesthetic, but for the large part leaves us unfeeling and untouched. ‘Shaitan’ suffers from a curse — the curse of ‘cool’.