On Kahaani and the dhokebaaz flashback

I’ve written a few times about the trickiness of book-to-film adaptations, including problems that arise from basic differences in the mediums – the written word vs the visual representation. One example is Ira Levin’s superb thriller A Kiss Before Dying (see this post) where the method of the suspense hinges on the fact that Levin’s medium does not require him to show us his murderer’s face (whereas a conventional narrative film doesn’t have this luxury). Another is Gautam Malkani’s novel Londonstani, which overturns all the reader’s assumptions by making a key revelation about its narrator-protagonist on the very last page (it’s hard to see how this book could be faithfully filmed).

Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani isn’t an adaptation of a book, but watching the film it struck me that one of its major plot-holes derives from a limitation of visual suspense – and that the effect would have been very different if presented in the form of a written story.

(Spoiler Alert – avoid reading on if you haven’t seen the film and are planning to go for it)

In general, I thought Kahaani was a gripping, skilfully constructed movie with many strong points – good pacing, attention to detail, an eye for character. It makes excellent use of Kolkata as a setting (one that has clearly been underutilised by Hindi cinema) and contains good performances, not just by Vidya Balan (whose role is trickier than it might at first appear) but also by Parambrata Chatterjee and Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who play two very different sorts of men who become involved with the central character’s quest. The relationship between Balan’s character Vidya Bagchi and her “saarthi”, the bashful policeman Rana (played by Chatterjee), includes some very charming, not-quite-romantic-but-who-knows interplay. And no one who sees the film will ever forget Bob Biswas, a pudgy, unfit hitman who is a tangle of contradictions: a life-insurance agent moonlighting as a killer; a sweet-looking Bengali babu who sometimes resembles a creepy bogeyman from a Hollywood slasher series (looked at up close, his face appears almost to be crumbling; when he isn’t busy making house visits, one imagines he lives alone with his long-dead, stuffed mother in some forgotten cranny of this old city).

There is little to fault in the creation of mood, but as the narrative builds towards an increasingly complicated climax with revelations and counter-revelations, plot-holes emerge – the sorts of things a compliant viewer is presumably expected to gloss over (or perhaps not notice in all the confusion). Midway through, there is an instance of visual cheating in the railway-platform scene that heralds the Intermission (anyone who watched the trailers will have seen it beforehand) – not only is this scene misleading, it’s also inconsistent with Kahaani’s overall tone. (As the wife pointed out, it belongs more in a Dabangg action sequence.) But the biggest glitch - in a movie that makes recurring use of the phrase “system error” - involves dishonest flashbacks.

When Vidya arrives in Kolkata from London in search of her husband Arnab, she goes to the police station and passes around a photo of the two of them together, taken on their wedding day; as she talks and reminisces, short flashbacks show her memory of him. In one, we see the photo being clicked; a later one shows her persuading him to go to Kolkata for his assignment. The flashbacks are presented in such a way – they are bookended by close-ups of Vidya looking contemplative and misty-eyed – that it’s reasonable to see them as genuine recollections. (If these scenes had been framed differently, it may have been possible to think these weren’t her memories but the mental images of the people who are hearing her story.)

Late in the film, we discover that though the broad outline of Vidya’s story was true (at some point in the past, she was married and pregnant, and her husband did leave London for Kolkata, never to return), the photograph she has been passing around is a doctored one – the man in it (let’s call him M) isn’t her husband but another man whom she is now on the trail of (and whom she doesn’t exactly harbour positive feelings for). This disclosure raises an obvious question: when we are shown Vidya’s memories, why is M playing the role of her husband in them? And the obvious answer is: to blindside the viewer at the cost of the film’s internal credibility.

More than 60 years ago Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright got some flak for a flashback scene that turned out to be a complete lie. Defenders of the film argued that the device was a legitimate one in the given context – being a visual representation of a murderer’s version of events – but the scene continued to make some viewers uncomfortable even decades later when narrative experimentation in cinema had become more common; it felt like a forced way of creating a barrier between the viewer and the story.

The lying flashbacks in Kahaani are even more problematic because they aren’t just a visualisation of a lie being told by one person to another – they are expressions of a character’s interiority. The only way they can be justified is by assuming that Vidya Bagchi is delusional (or that she has so thoroughly internalised her made-up story that she can no longer distinguish it from her reality) – but nothing else in the film supports this reading.

One can argue that, given the premise, there wasn't much else that could have been done. Much of the tension in Kahaani comes from the viewer’s ambivalence about Vidya; as seasoned viewers of suspense films, we are constantly aware that her version of events might only be a kahaani, a made-up story. (In discussions before the film released, I heard all sorts of theories, including the one that she is really a terrorist carrying around bombs for a huge attack during Durga Puja week.) But much of the film's emotional effectiveness comes from the way in which it makes us empathise with the character. As the narrative develops, as we get to know her better and appreciate her resourcefulness, persistence and the gentleness of her relationship with Rana (and with Bishnu, the kid who provides “running hot water”), we start rooting for her.

Not showing those flashbacks would have been a barrier to this empathy – it would have had the effect of making her a remote figure, giving us little sense of her inner world and her past. And showing them in such a way that we don’t get to see the husband’s face would have given the game away immediately.

For anyone who has seen the film, I’d be interested in knowing what you think about these scenes. Did you see them as deal-breakers or as minor flaws that you were happy not to dwell on? (I didn’t think they were deal-breakers myself, but they made Kahaani a less-than-convincing thriller for me – I thought its strengths lay elsewhere.) Also: was there any way these scenes could have been done differently without radically affecting the viewer’s connect with Vidya? Inputs welcome.