KAHAANI (2012)

Sometimes a clever chess player deliberately starts and plays his game with wrong moves to keep the opponent play blind folded as per his set plan and than he plays his natural fair-game giving a surprise check! Director Sujoy Ghosh’s ‘Kahaani’ is clever and smart story telling which keep baffling and engaging the audience busy solving the jigsaw puzzle about a pregnant woman’s who came straight from London to Kolkata in search for her husband. The story entangled the viewers from beginning with sub plot of a metro accident and another similar looking character (double identity), shocked them with an unlikely contract killer, entrapping them by introducing various characters leading one clue to another and all these while keeping them traveling the city of many faces. And than all of sudden it removes the snake’s skin of its script towards an unpredictable end. Absolutely smart filmmaking with cleverly played tactics in narrating the story and projecting the publicity and promos to give the audience enough tense and thrill as film unfolds on screen.

Saying all this I won’t call it a flawless or intelligent filmmaking. While making an engaging suspense thriller one should not change the premise of narration so many times to manipulate the audience’s expectations quite frequently. Ghosh finally ended up doing and repeating that in the end under the pretentiously tangled and too improbable script. If we keep this views on side for a while, the film is absolute entertainer and taut mystery which gives you jolts in many moments. It’s altogether different experience watching the film with so many unknown actors except almost brilliant Vidya Balan, an actress who one after another keep playing various purely Indian shades of ‘the woman’, not ‘the babe’ or ‘the girl’. She’s irreplaceable here too and nearly flawless in her performance. With her choices I’m pretty sure she’s going to win several other National Awards. Among all the actors one who pulls the attention among others is Nawazuddin Siddiqui and after working in few films as small roles this is his first full fledged supporting role as IB Officer Khan.

This is back to back second week where the directors who made impressive debuts and followed by certain forgettable films came back to form to entertain us. Last week it was Tigmanshu Dhulia who rejuvenated his spark in ‘Paan Singh Tomar’, this time it’s Ghosh who made one of cool entertainer of all-time ‘Jhankaar Beats’ returns with something so unimaginable from him!

Worthy to watch by all means.

Ratings- 7.5/10