In a new edition of This Day That Year, Subhash K Jha rexamines Mahesh Bhatt-Anurag Basu’s drama Murder, which released in 2004.
On a wet, windy morning in Bangkok, the forlorn Indian housewife Simran (Mallika Sherawat) in a clinging blue chiffon sari waves frantically for a taxi, drops her shopping bags in the wet chaos and comes face to face with a sensuous silhouette. “Come to my apartment for a cuppa,” the smirking stranger tells the housewife. Face mirroring a repressed sexuality and challenged values, she refuses and then changes her mind…to plunge into a lustful liaison that brings her well-ordered life to a crashing crescendo…
Welcome to the second remake of Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful in a week. With a far better cast, production values, and music score than last week’s Hawas, Murder kills your murderous murmurs about exploitative adaptations in the bud.
Where you expect a sleaze-fest, you get a tastefully mounted, deftly cut tale of betrayal and redemption set in a place far beyond the heroine’s on-display bosom.
In combining body with some soul, director Basu spins a sensuous coiling-recoiling yarn that averts the yawn by a mile…or near-abouts. Though the post-interval half, after the housewife’s lover is murdered, gets a wee too languorous and eager to please, the vice-like grip never falls away from the narrative.
There’re some amusing attempts to Indianize the wanton adultress’ character, make her more acceptable to the Indian middleclass’ scrambled sensibility. Hence, borrowing a bit from B.R. Chopra’s Gumrah, the neglected housewife Simran is actually married to her brother-in-law after her sister dies, leaving behind a child and a void in the widower’s heart that Simran finds impossible to fill.
In one of the strongest roles written for a woman protagonist in recent times, Mallika Sherawat gets to the heart of her character and creates a woman who’s as appealing in her persona as in her acceptance and comfort level with her sensuality. In the scenes depicting the housewife’s loneliness (“A married woman’s loneliness can be much more terrifying than a single woman”) and in her arguments with her workaholic husband, Sherawat is surprisingly equal to the occasion.
Wish the same could be said about her two male co-stars who are just about adequate. Though a watchable actor in Footpath, Emran Hashmi’s hunk act is way out of line. He seems to have been chosen only because he’s an adept kisser. Sure enough, his skill in that area is employed generously in the love scenes. Ashmit Patel, in the husband’s role, is thoroughly miscast. The role required someone worldweary and middleaged, like Jackie Shroff perhaps.
True to the Bhatt style, there aren’t too many supporting characters swamping the central scenario, except Raj Zutsi, the belligerent cop whose interrogation yields a two-toned narration. Both protagonists own up to the murder( a la Mohan Sehgal’s Sajan in the 1960s).
It’s only when the film begins to get too clever for its own good that the plot loses its cool. The end-game, an invention that takes Murder away from its source material, is typical of the Bhatts’s cinema. The heightened horror with a dollop of Hindu mythology whereby the now-repentant wife fights to save her marriage and dignity from the lover’s clammy clutches is the Raaz formula rehashed and heated at a titillating temperature.
To the film’s credit, the plot is peopled by arresting moments of erotica and emotions. From the windswept opening to the over-the-top climax, Fuwad Khan’s camera plays a captivating game of light and shade with the inner and outer locations.
The absence of humbug is largely appreciable, though attempts to make the adulteress sympathetic (for example, Simran very conveniently knows the lover from before marriage) dilute the woman’s dilemma.
And yet what remains behind is, on the whole, not only watchable but, at times, a little beyond that. Anu Malik’s music is a big help. ‘Bheege honth tere’ is filmed with the fecund fluidity of a free-flowing erotic painting. Though the background music gets suitably oppressive towards the end, the narrative has a remarkable soundtrack, cleaned out of extraneous sounds and yet containing enough incidental noises to indicate a life beyond the immediate words.
Though some of the love scenes go boldly beyond the prescriptions of mainstream eroticism, they are tastefully done. Most of all, there’s Mallika Sherawat giving to her post-debut appearance the kind of erotic energy and restrained emotionalism that one last saw in Urmila Matondkar’s Rangeela and missed sorely in Bipasha Basu’s Jism.
