Nishabd

By Subhash K Jha

Amitabh Bachchan, Jiah Khan, Revathy, Nasser, Shraddha
Directed by Ram Gopal Varma
Rating: ****

Finally, there's just the man and his looming loneliness. He could end it right now. But he chooses to live on, so that he could live with with the memories of lost love for a bit longer.

Ram Gopal Varma's Nishabd leaves you speechless. Its pulsating but humane play of light and shade within the sprawling gorgeous greenery of a tea estate is the closest you're going to come to passion of a renaissance painting in Hindi cinema.

Varma's mastery over visuals that tell a prowling tale of reclamation and retribution has never been in doubt. Those qualities that have always made his cinema look unique, are here applied to a theme, emotion and passions that have so far remained forbidden to Varma's range of vision.

In telling a 60-year old 'happily' married man's sudden and inexplicable passion for his daughter's 18- year old friend, Ramu goes for the jugular.

The luminous language of Nishabd makes you grope for new words to describe the whole experience of watching a film that unfolds like the petals of a wild but tender flower.

From pistols to petals…you never thought Varma had it in him. He makes the transition with the rugged fluency of a man who has seen it all, done it all and portrayed it all.

Varma now gets into the introspective mode. Nishabd is a brooding though never dark look at an autumnal life that suddenly discovers passion and excitement. The eruption of passion is manifested in little but luminous things like the sprout of a gushing water fountain, or the atypical laughter of a patriarch who has just discovered the clandestine pleasure of playing footsie under the table with his daughter's friend.

The confusions, turmoils, adventure and, yes, playful expeditions into topographical and emotional areas that no Hindi film has dared to visit, make thisVarma's most accomplished film to date.

Forget the bravura technique-infested gangsterism of Satya, even the lyrical violence of Company gets left behind. In Nishabd Varma takes cinema steps further from the folds of the familiar to stand perched on the edge of an emotional precipice of passion where anything can happen.

Never afraid to take risks Ramu plunges straight into a fear-filled heart of an aging man who suddenly feels emotions that he never knew existed within him. It's a double-deckered process of discovery for the director and his protagonist. Both venture into an unlit territory of bright smothered passions with the arresting aplomb of a master filmmaker collaborating with the performing maestro.

You've seen Varma ferret out a unique performance from Mr Bachchan in Sarkar. Nothing prepares you for the serenely flowing emotions that spill out of the maestro's eyes. face and entire being as he grapples with his uncontrollable feelings for the fey and feisty Jiah. Here's a performance that sucks you into its emotions while remaining at the subtlest range of expressions.

If moments make a monument of eternity in the cosmic scheme, then in Nishabd Ramu has achieved that synthesis of time and experience that gives human relationships that spin of eternity.

Technical soundness is of course a pre-condition and a hallmark of Varma's cinema. In Nishabd he applies his trademark technique (prowling restless camera movements, unpredictable shot divisions, characters caught at uncomfortable emotional and physical angles…) to a world far removed from the gangsterism, violence and horror of his earlier cinema.

Then there is Mr Bachchan. What could possibily be said about this performance of his that would suggest how much further he has gone into the recesses of the wounded human heart in search of that one question which determines and colours all our yesterdays todays and tomorrows—what's the purpose of our existence?

According to Varma's amazing dialogue writer Amrik Gill. it's happiness. Somewhere, says Mr Bachchan, straight and piercingly into Amit Roy's probing camera, we lose sight of life's raison d'etre.

That quest for joy which we forfeit in our pursuit of day-to-day aspirations is retrieved in this elegiac yet exhilarating film about re-discovering passion and yes, disconnecting it with sex to take the matter of the human heart far far above the belt.

There're innumerable moments of unalloyed cinema in this tormenting and sensuous treatise on forbidden passion. Mr Bachchan's lighter moments with the whimsical Lolita of the new millennium are saucily grand.

But it's the whole screenplay of a smothered and sublime tragedy that he builds around his character, its journey from restrained amusememt to a stunning slouch, that makes this performance by the Big B indescribably exceptional. The opposite of bravura is the closest I could come to defining the performance.

The Big B's chemistry with Ms Khan (unarguably Varma's best discovery to date) is so virile and vulnerable, so tender to the touch and yet invincible at the core, that you wonder which came first… the actor or the urge to design cinema that taps his unique persona and potential.

A special word for Amar Mohile's background score. It creates a new intimate idiom of expression unifying the call of the human heart with Nature and its most flawed creation, the humanbeing.

The sheer synthesis of the greenery outside with the sepias and blues of the indoors makes your heart and mind coalesce in a salute to a film that elevates the traditional language of cinema to the plane of unrhymed poetry.