Andha dhun
*ing: Ayushmann Khurrana, Tabu, Radhika Apte, Anil Dhawan, Zakir Hussain, Ashwini Kalsekar, Manav Vij, Chaya Kadam
Rated: 8/10
It’s only once in a long while that Bollywood throws up splashy and meteoric thrillers but when it does, absolute delights like Andha Dhun come along to stitch back your expectations from the otherwise over the top dream merchants.
Andha Dhun can be, beyond doubt, termed as a perfect modern thriller mounted with polish and finish by director Sriram Raghavan. It has suspense, it has pace, it has a no-nonsense attitude both when murders are being committed and also when the witness is trying to survive the murky goings-on. Not that he is not murky himself, posing as a blind man who can almost everything, except what is coming next from an unscrupulous, ambitious woman who has just packed off the body of her husband in a suitcase through her trigger happy lover who happens to be an equally unscrupulous cop.
It is not just the story, inspired by French thriller Le Accordeur (The Piano Player), but also the perfection introduced by Raghavan in other aspects of film-making, including choice of actors and music synchronising an old world charm from an unhurried city like Pune, that makes Andha Dhun a breeze to sway with.
Ayushmaan Khurana as the blind pianist is super cool and plays his part to the hilt, immersing you inexorably into his situation, but with no tear-jerker intentions. Hired by a yesteryear Bollywood star to play the piano at his home as a marriage anniversary gift to his wife, the apparently blind pianist sees a murder so foul that he has to, well, carry on playing without even an iota of emotion that would suggest he was witnessing a foul cover up.
Much of the film, punctuated by resurrected old numbers from Anil Dhavwan’s films, and some very peppy and apt songs moulded to the situation by a brilliant Amit Trivedi, carries on uninterrupted, often making you forget the corn and cola on the side.
Tabu, as the incorrigibly deceitful and almost sub-human second wife of the slain star, is the centrepoint of the movie, and she gives many moments to the film with her acting acumen. In her, Raghavan embodies how morality is a misnomer in modern society and excellently counterfoils the perceived complete disruption in society through his pianist who too is unscrupulous but in a much more benign kind of way.
Radhika Apte, though on the periphery, renders a captivating cameo of a post-modern woman who has flippant humour and intelligence running in her feisty veins.
From murder, to cover-up, to organ selling to extortion, blackmail and the abysmal fall of values in characters from all strata of society, this film keeps you on the hook till the end of the road. “Every life has a liver,” says a cryptic statement in the beginning but it is only at the end of it that you get to know why and how awfully that is true in an unforgiving world that we perilously inhabit, a world we have built up by and by without thought or reason. Tabu encapsulates that, Ayushmann propels it and his accomplices play it out even as Apte accepts it by being generally unaffected by it.