He also throws in a direct reference to the original just to make sure you get the point. The script is an inspired retelling of Roman Polanski’s seventies noir classic Chinatown and to the director’s credit, he does not hide it, but instead pays tribute to it in his own way by reworking the plot and some key scenes to suit his point of view. We have the character elements of the noir genre in ample measure: a morally ambiguous, loveless world, populated by cynical and apathetic characters each driven by their own lusts and greed, the femme fatale who is sympathetic to the hero, mysterious damsels in distress, the aging patriarch with his insatiable ravenousness for power justifying his actions by appealing to the “natural order of things”, crooked cops, scummy goons, and nosey neighbors. So what does the director do here? Navdeep Singh has crafted a film dripping with nuances of life in a small desert town, and has used the metaphor of the desert to suggest the aridness and sterility of the life of the chief protagonist, Satyaveer Randhawa, underplayed superbly by Abhay Deol. The Noir (French for night, literally and figuratively standing for ‘black film’) genre gave us such Hollywood films like The Maltese Falcon and The Asphalt Jungle in the forties and fifties, and more recently the conventions of the genre have been reworked in neo noir films like the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Share your views and stay tuned to The Indian Wire for more such articles.Yes, in the fifties we had them for sure, notable amongst them being Baazi and Aar Paar, both directed by Guru Dutt, but they suffered from the fact that the mores of film making in India did not really allow the chief protagonist to be cynical, morally ambiguous, and deeply pessimistic about the world: a world that was jaded and characterized by an acute loss of faith in ‘universal’ values of love and justice. This film is definitely one of the underappreciated films in the last decade. The film also stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Raima Sen, and Vinay Pathak. The ending is one of the best we have ever seen in any Hindi film.
The film follows a linear storyline and keeps its characters more real and subtle to their tones. This film states that a noir or thriller needs no dark themes or scattered cinematography. The story takes various turns which makes it more interesting, from dark humor to unexpected twists, change of relationships, etc.
The film is filled with layers of mysteries and suspense as it goes deeper in the town and the story which has been disclosed for a long time.ĥ87" src="" alt="A still from Manorama Six Feet Under" width="1024" height="457" srcset=" 1024w, 300w, 768w, 1536w, 990w, 1320w, 1600w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> Satyaveer turns a private detective and spies on the wrongdoings of the politician Rathore (Kharbanda). The film follows the story of a suspended junior engineer of the Public Works Department, Satyaveer (Deol), how he comes across a woman who pretends to be the wife of a local and strong politician of the town. The opening scene itself creates a mood as the protagonist Satyaveer Randhawa introduces the peacefully disturbing tale of the town and how his life is the same as the fate of this small town which remains an underdog in the nation. The film is a tribute to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown and draws just an idea of the plot from this classic and is placed in a small deserted town in Rajasthan, Lakhot. And one such fine remake is the 2007 film Manorama: Six Feet Under, directed by Navdeep Singh and featuring Abhay Deol, Gul Panag, and Kulbhushan Kharbana in the main roles. While most of the remakes in the Hindi film industry are just a mere work of copy-paste or are just a rendered addition of unnecessary elements such as songs and love angles, there are few remakes which light up the rays of hope, as their main motive is only a tribute to a work of art which they have loved or appreciated rather than being made just for the means of business.