In a new This Day That Year feature, Subhash K Jha looks back at Raveena Tandon’s dark mystery Soch, which notches 23 years.
Debutant director Sushen Bhatnagar does strange things to Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers On A Train, down to the classic nailbiting chase at a funfare.
Neither fun, nor very fair, if we look at the way Bhatnagar has transposed Hitchcock into the Indian film industry and added some scathing comments on the callousness of the paparazzi and how it affects the lives of those who are constantly put under the microscope by the news-hounds.
In Soch, the original noire thriller ends up pretty much as a nowhere thriller. Bhatnagar’s Hitchcockian conceits are constantly bottlenecked by the concessions to commercialism. The surplus of slapstick and songs which recurs at infuriatingly frequent intervals brings on a chronic migraine into the movie. The humour generated by comedian Tiku Talsania as a Bihari wannabe politician learning the finer points of his trade by trying to be a criminal in Mumbai, and the downpour of musty melody by Jatin-Lalit bring Bhatnagar’s fairly pathbreaking subject matter down to the level of pulpy natter.
There are seeds of a spanking thriller scattered across the semi-arid canvas . Raj Matthews (Sanjay Kapoor) is the archetypal filmy superstar with a frustrated ex-actress Madhurika (Aditi Govitrikar, billed as a debutante though she was earlier seen in Mani Shankar’s 16 December).
Sick and depressed Raj seeks solace in his director-choreographer Preeti (Raveena Tandon). Though she fantasizes mammoth song-and-dance sequences with him , Preeti is just “a good friend” of Raj until much later in the plot when director Bhatnagar mimics Hollywood superstar Richard Gere’s infamous flashing-of-his-genitals incident before an intrusive paparazzi, by making Raj clutch Preeti to his chest and taunting the photographs to click them as a hot item.
Unfortunately, Sanjay Kapoor isn’t Richard Gere. He isn’t even a major star in our own country. To accept him as a hysteria-inducing pinup idol is as difficult as to accept Bhatnagar’s over-pickled Hitchcock as a tribute to the original’s masterful study of the psychology of vendetta.
The theme of murder-swapping from Strangers On A Train worked because of its ironic edge. Miraculously that edge remains visible in Bhatnagar’s adaptation, thanks to Arbaaz Khan’s psychotic killer’s role. Bhatnagar’s treatment of this character demonstrates a keener understanding of human psychology than the other characters who are either undersketched (Raveena’s choreographer-director’s part seems to struggle between virtue and vice and ends up as neither fire nor ice) or over-caricatural (Aditi Gowatriker’s paranoid wife careens between Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and Urmila Matondkar in Pyar Tune Kya Kiya without getting past the shrill-will).
Soch gleans a modicum of creative energy from Arbaaz Khan’s character and his troubled homicidal relationship with his cop-father (Danny Denzongpa) , which was never a part of the original film. The scenes between ‘superstar’ Sanjay Kapoor and his fanatic fan who resolves to put his idol out of misery by murdering the star’s obsessive wife, are done with a certain degree of brio lacking in the rest of the film.
Arbaaz’s flat even-toned delivery gives his unhinged character a menacing edge. Dialogue writer Atul Tiwari has saved the best lines for him. “Your wife wasn’t a good woman I just rang her once and she agreed to come,” the psycho tells the star confidentially , replicating in a strange disembodied way the dialogues between ‘fan’ Robert de Niro and basketball superstar Wesley Snipes in Tony Scott’s The Fan.
Bhatnagar is comfortable enough touching up and embellishing the thriller genre. Scenes such as the one where Arbaaz barges into Raveena’s bathroom and involves her in a friendly chat are cleverly devised and shot in a para-‘noire’-mal light by Rajen Kothari. The sequence at the funfare where the stranger Arbaz pulls the trigger on the star’s wife is marvellously shot. But the dance items reminiscent of the ebony erotica of Rakesh Mehra’s Aks , flatter Raveena only to deceive her at the end. The rapidly maturing actress has an eminently ambivalent role in a plot where the two male characters take centrestage.
When it comes to the interweavement of the relationship among the characters the director seems to be at a loss. The characters are all bonded by brutality. But they don’t cohere to a sharply defined design. For a thriller, there are too many distractions from the main issue. And the pre-climactic drama in a movie theatre where the superstar goes on stage to challenge the killer, is pretentious enough to reduce the tension to a jokey level.
Still compared to cascade of cliches in the other release that week (Maine Dil Tujhko Diya) Soch gets an extra point for trying to push the formuistic envelope and for trying to take a compassionate view of film stars and their turbulent lives.
Though Soch is neither as slick as Rakesh Mehra’s Aks nor as clever as Ketan Mehta’s Aar Ya Paar its tale of immorality works mainly because of Arbaaz Khan. He performs far better than his brother Sohail in this week’s other film.
And where but in Soch (thought) can Sanjay Kapoor see himself winning a best actor award?
