It’s interesting to see women directors in India pushing the envelope to explore themes. After we had Farah Khan doing a ‘boys’ film (Main Hoon Na), the following year, Vinta Nanda, a past master at TV soaps, turned the tables on the macho brigade in Bollywood by doing the kind of angst-laden film on suburban paranoia that would normally go to a male director like Mahesh Bhatt.
White Noise is Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth without the comfort of distance. Nanda plunges right into the centre of her protagonist’s anguished universe. Her first-hand experiences in the TV industry, her despair at getting caught up in the mediocrity and morass of the Great Indian Soap Trick, and most importantly, her acerbic study of promiscuous, easy-flowing relationships in showbiz are given a peculiarly pungent treatment in her debut spin.
By a stroke of luck, Nanda has got a relatively untried but potentially explosive actress to play the protagonist. As the TV writer Gauri Khanna, Koel Puri burns up the screen with her raw yet restrained energy. Her post-debut performance (she was earlier seen in a quietly compelling performance in Rahul Bose’s “Everybody Says I’m Fine”) is no less than a spiked requiem to psychological complexity.
Nanda’s protagonist is a tough nut to crack. Gauri is as fragile from the inside as she seems tough from the outside. The blend of the brittle and the unbreakable is reflected in scene after scene of scathing satire, where we see Gauri at her workplace. The constant bitching, the efforts to give a semblance of decency and coherency to the Saas-Bahu serial on air for donkey’s ears, and Gauri’s brave efforts to ride the wave of gender-based mediocrity are thematic strands that tie themselves up in a bewildering knot about the nullity of life’s spiraling ambitions.
Moving in and out of Gauri’s work and personal relationships, Nanda constructs a stirring drama of self-destruction… with a last-minute redemption that seems to be brought on more by the screenwriter than the character’s destiny.
We’ve watched female protagonists topple over the brink before, but never quite like this one. When we first see Gauri, she’s lost to the everyday world. In a series of jump cuts, we’re told she has been given the heave-ho by her married lover, Pavan (Aryan Vaid). The severance has shattered her.
Enter the gentle and sensitive Karan Deol. It takes an actor of Rahul Bose’s devices to make Karan more than a stereotype. Bose has played the role of the supportive companion in Mr & Mrs Iyer and Chameli. In White Noise, the character is played at a different pitch — with more casual cynicism and yet a firm comprehension of the contradictions that make metro-centric life such a melange of the bitter and the sweet. Without sweating over the details, Bose’s character insinuates itself into Gauri Khanna’s life and makes spaces where there’s a heaving hole of screaming anxieties.
Some fringe characters are a little lost in the plot, or rather they seem to have lost the plot. Ashiesh Roy, as a TV director who keeps referring to Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, is too shallow to be a parody of profundity. And the satire on soap culture (two actresses from Nanda’s path-breaking soap “Tara” — Navneet Nishan and Amita Nangia -make funny in-your-farce guest appearances to drive the point about the all-pervasive impact of the soaps) makes you wonder if Nanda fears the audience would rather stay home to watch soaps than come to the theatres to watch her debut film. The scenes between Bose and Puri almost always ring true. There’s a strange, dry, and yet decisive chemistry between the two. Their introduction to each other on a rain-splashed evening seemed an echo of Guru Dutt’s first meeting with Waheeda Rehman in Kaagaz Ke Phool. Though let me hasten to clarify that there are no Guru Dutts, Waheedas and phools in White Noise. The dialogues, though credible, often make use of words like “precedence” and “propriety” that don’t occur in everyday language.
