On February 4, 2005, 20 years ago, two films were released simultaneously. While Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black mastered the marque, Pritish Nandy Productions’ capricious and captivating Shabd is remembered within the film fraternity for the infamous incident wherein the late and much missed Pritish Nandy’s plucky daughter Rangita asked Shah Rukh Khan, Gauri Khan to leave preview screening meant only for the cast and crew of Shabd.
Sometimes, an interesting premise fails to carry a film to a luminous conclusion. Shabd has it all: a truly striking plot, great looking cast, terrific locations and mesmeric cinematography. Yet it misses the bus, stops short of delivering a genre-defying wallop in the jaded face of the box-office.
Shabd proves one thing for all times. Merely packaging a different plot in gloss cannot compensate for the absence of intrinsic credibility in the proceedings. Debutante director Leena Yadav displays a flair for framing her shots in whispering silhouettes and hushed contours. Just what these hushed whispers are trying to say is not fully or even partially comprehensible.
The plot has just three characters. Unlike Rai’s previous arthouse product Raincoat (also an intimate character study), here, the incidental characters don’t fit into the narrative.
Caught between a critical snarl for his last book and writer’s block, Shauqat (Sanjay Dutt) encourages his stunningly poised wife, Antara (Aishwarya Rai), to get close to a colleague on the campus so he’d have something to write about. The debutante director could nonetheless have infused an enigmatic electricity into her unorthodox triangle if only she had not made the film so heavyhanded and wordy. Every pause in the plot is filled with words of sighing ambiguity; every episode comes with italicized footnotes. Though relevant and insightful, the dialogues (by Sutapa Sarkar) simply flow in a suffocating spillover so that you are never close to the three characters.
The words simply—or not so simply—come in the way. Dutt and Rai try to cross the bridge of verbosity and succeed to a point. Dutt’s lined face and anguished demeanour lend a queasy grace to the self-absorbed and delusory world of the writer.
But it’s Rai who surprises you. Never outside Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s cinema has she looked so ethereal, fragile, and confident. In her role as a wife who becomes a casualty of a strange spousal mind game, Rai brings a tight emotional craving to lunge towards a reality check. She’s all there…and yet lost!
I had a problem with Zayed Khan’s character and performance. Considering Yash is meant to be a lecturer in the same college as the writer’s wife and considering his presence is supposedly empowered by the writer’s imagination (or, at least so we believe since Shauqat keeps pounding on his typewriter to announce the Other Man’s each manoeuvre) why does Zayed have to dress talk and behave like a camp carryover of his character in Main Hoon Na???
As a performer, he’s fine as long as he’s funny. When he tries to be serious, he ends up being doubly funny.
Dutt and Rai carry the film towards a mellow and mature destination. Dutt has a specially difficult role as a writer rapidly losing touch with reality. He lets his character’s pain show on screen without guilt or apology.
Beyond a point, the two principal actors fail to do anything with Leena Yadav’s tangled triangle.
Shabd is like an intricate jigsaw puzzle where the final picture doesn’t come together because there are vital pieces missing in the design.
Is Yash, for example, just a figment of Shauqat’s imagination? Why does Antara go along with her husband’s bizarre plans of thrusting her onto the young man (almost a boy)? He suffers from a mental block. But what does she suffer from? A spouse scare? Besides Dutt and Rai, the life-saver is Aseem Bajaj’s cinematography. Though a little too showy to be fully effectual, the artwork (Omung Patel) and the photography tend to lend a dazzling array of slick images to this interesting, though flawed film. Hats off to the producers for venturing into an untrodden theme without fear of the dark.
