Plot holes & tale twisters

Among the joys of being a movie buff in the Internet age (and I speak with the hoary wisdom of one who remembers an earlier time) is the opportunity to have limitless public discussions about a stimulating film. You can examine the nuts and bolts of a movie, supply diverse readings of a scene, get technical, argue about seemingly inconsequential details, stupefy people by making obscure references. At some point you might even find yourself exchanging notes with the people who made the film — and such is the power of subtextual analysis, you are under no obligation to agree even with their interpretations!

Certain types of films lend themselves more readily to such conversations — the ones with non-linear narratives, for example. Or a twist-in-the-tail thriller that builds suspense by sprinkling red herrings about, manipulating our feelings about a character, and ending with a revelation that leads the viewer to revisit everything that preceded it. Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani — a story about a pregnant woman looking for her missing husband in Kolkata — is this sort of film, and it has been sparking intense discussions on cinema blogs and messageboards. Some of the talk has reminded me of the discourse that took place a decade ago when Mulholland Drive and Memento (films with complex and ambiguous narrative structures) came out in the US.

Personally I thought Kahaani was a gripping, skilfully constructed film with many strengths: among them good pacing, marvellous use of setting and fine performances. But I also thought that as a thriller, it had large plot-holes — the sorts of things a compliant viewer is presumably expected to gloss over, or perhaps not think too much about. Among these holes (spoiler alert) are the flashbacks we see early on, when the protagonist Vidya Bagchi is reminiscing about her husband. At the end of the film, we discover that the man shown in these nostalgic shots was not her ever-loving husband but someone she has reason to hate.

The jury is out on whether the flashbacks are outright dishonest (which would imply the filmmakers playing hard and fast with the story’s internal consistency) or simply misdirecting (in the way that red herrings in a mystery legitimately might be). This depends on whether you see them as Vidya’s memories or as the mental images of the people who are hearing her (fake) story. When I wrote about this on my blog, I got a variety of responses – among them a long and thoughtful email from the film’s co-writer Nikhil Vyas, who explained the flashbacks in terms of the character’s conditioning; she had so thoroughly internalised her own story that she was imagining a version of events that she wanted other people to believe. Meanwhile, in a newspaper interview, director-writer Ghosh offered a marginally different interpretation – which goes to show that even people who have worked in close collaboration on a film might have different ways of rationalising a particular scene.

Elsewhere, debates have been raging about the credibility of the film’s depiction of the Intelligence Bureau (a commenter I know suggested that some of the characters came straight out of a James Bond or Mission Impossible series and had no connection with real-world espionage) and other plot specifics — by now, many people have probably gone to see the movie a second time just to be able to participate more fully in these conversations! I have some reservations about Kahaani (I think some of the rave reviews it has received have been over the top), but it has facilitated new levels of impassioned discussion, and that is never a bad thing in a culture where people think movies shouldn’t be analysed too much because they are “just entertainment”.

 

Jai Arjun SinghI is a Delhi-based writer