Subhash K Jha looks at 24 years of Hansal Mehta’s underrated crime thriller Chhal in this edition of This Day That Year.
“Whether it’s the underworld or the police force, they’re all the same,” spits out the disgusted police informer Karan Menon (KK) who infiltrates a powerful underworld gang in Mumbai . Chhal is the story of the gangbusters rapidly mutating loyalties and allegiances as he realizes that the more you embrace an ethical propriety the more you question the very basis of modernday morality.
Though that isn’t the narrative pattern Chhal follows, first things first. Chhal isn’t an “easy” film to follow. Its dark brooding ambience conjoined with a numbing moral ambiguity and a defiant disregard for conventional storytelling make Chhal the most complex gangster epic from Mumbai.
Barring Ram Gopal Varma’s Company which constructed a spiral of doomed and damned morality in conflicting colours of right and wrong , Mehta’s treatise on gangsterism is the finest crime thriller from mainstream Hindi cinema. A large part of the credit for the work’s arresting moral and emotional ambivalence goes to screenwriter Suparn Verma.
Verma’s script takes on an intriguingly “Hollywood” premise—what if a lawmaker joins the lawbreakers to beat them at their own game?—and turns it into a hypnotic game of cat and mouse where the hunter and the haunted occupy interchangeable places. For a low-budget film director Mehta (whose earlier work Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar, though based on an unorthodox premise, had displayed an amateurish flamboyance) achieves one helluva lot within a limited budget. Filmmakers who pour in multiple-crore budgets to make jumbo-sized nothings should carefully watch the structural and visual impact that Mehta achieves without getting hot and bothered with the bank balance.
The gang-war shoot -outs shot on the roads of Mumbai are so chillingly real , we wonder how Mehta got such raw realism into his film without losing grip on the stylish “noire” vision of the violence. If there’s an element of Ram Gopal Varma in Mehta’s study of gangsterism there’s also the stunning elan of John Woo’s choreographic stunts in Chhal specially in the climactic shoot-out in a water-pump factory.
Mehta’s film begins six months before present time when in a shoot out in a cinema hall’s toilet, the volatile gangster Girish (Prashant Narayanan ) ruthlessly guns down a man who had tried to kidnap his sister. The stunningly staged action scene immediately establishes the characterizations and paves the way for the terrible moral and physical conflicts that follow.
Mehta’s narrative moves into several directions without reaching deadends. On the one hand his protagonist Karan represents the Hamletian dilemma of a law enforcer trapped between duty towards his job and love for the gangster’s sister Padmini(played by a pale and unappealing debutante Jaya Seal). On the other hand Karan is the archetypal ‘Dirty Harry’ cop who guns his macho way through heft heroics.
Mehta weaves love into the vista of violence with deft hands. Viju Shah’s amazingly assured songs and background score go a long way in cementing the seemingly incompatible worlds of love and violence. The pulse-pounding title track merges into the melting melody line of the love ballad Chup- chap bringing the protagonist’s conflicting emotions into a sharp- focussed perspective.
Ajay Verekar’s art direction and Neelabh Kaul’s cinematography create a tangy metallic milieu, a counter-world to the luscious and enticing world of Sanjay Bhansali’s Devdas, where the doomed world of the gangsters flare up in dangerous colours that denote both excitement and death.
Standing at the vortex of this dangerously seductive kingdom of annhiliation is actor KK Menon. Seen mostly on television and sporadically on screen (remember Bhopal Express?) Chhal marks the advent of a formidable heroic talent. To the complex role of the torn-and-anguished undercover cop KK brings an edgy anguish and a mordant eloquence seldom seen in Hindi cinema.
Television star Prashant Narayan as the antagonist Girish concentrates too hard on getting the external impetuosity of his character right. Unlike KK he misses the soul of his character except when expressing sudden spurts of unalloyed love for his sister or awakening to the brutal truth that his newly found friend and loyalist is actually a police informer.
The other real ‘hero’ of Chhal is Apurva Asrani’s editing . In the most beguiling game of light and shade ever seen in a commercial film Asrani cuts the sequences in an ironic salute to music videos. This ostensibly incongruous pattern of editing imparts an extra dimension of energy to the charged and chilling narration. In one sequence Asrani juxtaposes Girish’s sister confessing her love for Karan with Girish confronting Karan about the matter. Here the editing mode turns a basket ball into a character in the plot.
The film throbs with vibrantly violent life that creeps up on us like a tidal wave. One wishes Hansal Mehta had avoided the atrociously choreographed floor-show number or the trite sequence where the cop Karan sees a dead colleague’s family wailing with funereal flamboyance. The self-consciously cyclic ending where we see another police man being prepared for underworld infiltration negates the film’s structural unorthodoxy.
Chhal works so effectively because it allows us to enter into the anguished inner world of its protagonist. Beyond that, who cares?
