AndhaDhun : Wicked & Deep is the Fog that Thrills

Civilization is but a thin veneer and what keeps it on and functioning is the barest of a social construct. Give the power to anyone to be absolved of this and the animal in man emerges with a vengeance. Sriram Raghavan’s characters have always been these tight rope walkers, grey, dark, amoral and tautly wound. Their believable characteristics emerges from this.

Right from his “Ek Haseena Thhi”, “Badlapur”, “Johnny Gaddar” to now “AndhaDhun” Raghavan conveyed that every man craves and craves badly but what limits one is the wafer thin barrier created by social community living. Remove that and every man, woman and child is immoral, can stoop to any level, peer into anyone's life shamelessly, take things that may not belong to him or even wipe somebody off cleanly if they are undetected or not seen. It is like Plato said in 'The Republic' in the episode of the 'Ring of Ghyges; The Ring makes the wearer invisible. This is the truest test of moral character of what one can, shall, would and does when one is not seen.

AndhaDhun begins with a one eyed pest of a rabbit in a cabbage field evading a furious hunter and the scene abruptly fades off into an unseen climactic darkness to open up to light on Prabhat Road in Pune. From the one eyed rabbit the plot has veered onto a blind Pianist Aakash (Ayushmann Khurana) and his recently bumped into muse Sophie (Radhika Apte) on the streets of Pune. Raghavan’s comfort in his hometown makes the city one of the intrinsic characters of the plot. Sophie lands Aakash a job in Franco’s pub and there one sees the faded movie star Pramod Sinha (Anil Dhavan) and his young saucy wife of a suspect moral fiber. The blind Aakash gets embroiled in an intricate plot of wicked proportions and then with every single passing moment falls deeper and deeper into the mess. 

The plot draws inspiration from the French Movie “ L’Accordeur’ or the Piano Tuner. Raghavan does not permit you to sit still in your cinema seat relaxed for more than ten minutes and as the brilliantly nuanced characters interact with each other across rather surprising twists and turns exposing a different hue, the story hurtles onto a mind-blowing open ended climax the kind only an auteur of Raghavn’s cerebral class can come up with. Manav Vij as the philandering cop and his high strung yet loving wife Ashwini Kalsekar or Chhaya Kadam as a lottery seller and Zakir Hussain as the ordinarily never suspected doctor engaged in the nefarious organ trade…each of them is individually brilliant. Nothing in the story line is expected and it is as if a general plot line was chalked out and the actors having interacted, dashed against each other, lived their characters so fully that the story wrote itself, got enriched and taken to another level; one that is simply spectacular. 

Ayushmann  Khurana  is in a role of a life time and so spot on is his essaying the character that at every moment one starts feeling sympathy empathy wonder disgust and even dislike for the shades conveyed as is the case with Tabu who is supreme in her part that she has effortlessly drawn onto and worn like a second skin. This is the perfect foil and these two own the movie. Radhika Apte is sweet sincere and very comfortable one who is very natural. 

The punches that Raghavan gives the viewer are felt as audible gasps and thrilled embarrassed laughter of having been caught unawares in shock, surprise and thrill. The pace of the movie is relentless till post interval it meanders for a while in the organ trade business but before it loses sight is quickly back and leads to a stunning climax that joins most of the dots.

Superb camerawork, slick editing and clear story telling backed by brilliant performances undoubtedly makes this movie an unmissable, must watch movie of 2018.