Nishabd

Old man, young girl. Ram Gopal Varma’s Nishabd is more American Beauty than the the Nabokov classic: his Jiah is no pre-pubescent Lolita; she is a full-bodied eighteen-year-old sexually charged machine, waiting to be kickstarted into action.

The film is shot through with flashes of the old Ramu, in the days when he used to be able to make movies which held. The execution turns it fuzzy: Nishabd could have been a truly explosive love story, but its potential is frittered away.

Ramu charges into territory not trod in Hindi movies ( the girl makes all the moves, and with a single-minded seriousness of purpose, which leaves none of us in any doubt about her intentions, let alone the man she makes a dead set at) with a terrific first half. As in that superb Oscar-winning Hollywood movie American Beauty, the awareness between Bachchan, a family man with a wife and a daughter, and Jiah ( Jiah Khan) is built up steadily and sensuously.

From being his daughter’s friend, come to spend the holidays on their tea estate, she turns into an object of desire, through a series of beautifully shot scenes—Jiah frolicking in the garden with a hose-pipe, firm, youthful flesh on display; Jiah walking across a room; Bachchan’s gaze fixed on her acre-long legs, gloriously bare under the flimsiest of shorts; Jiah reading aloud from her diary, Bachchan unable to tear his eyes away : in the end, he is not listening, only looking, drinking her in.

The director flubs it post-interval, because he doesn’t know quite how far he wants to take it. He is brave, but only up to a point. Having Bachchan bed Jiah would have been the natural corollary of all that suppressed passion, but that would have been doing it too brown.

So Nishabd descends into a plane which has a weeping-wife-enraged-daughter counterpointing an unnaturally understanding-brother-in-law (if my sister’s sixty year old husband is lusting after a buxom babe, I’d slug him first, and then ask questions, right?) A callow boyfriend (Aftab) is conveniently made to show up, to help Jiah’s ignominous exit.

Ramu is clearly no lover of subtleties, and that works against the movie in many ways : Revathi, who has weathered twenty-seven years of her marriage with Bachchan, with grey hair, and rimmed spectacles, is made to appear downright dowdy. What if she was still sexy, and Jiah not-so-much-in-our-face-that-we-can’t-blink? She is togged out in low, low bustiers, and really short shorts. In one scene she is in sheer white, her outline clearly visible, like Antara before her, and Urmila before her. Ramu, like Raj Kapoor, also likes his women in barely-there flimsies.

Jiah has masses of curly hair falling all over her unfettered bosom, and an I-don’t-care NRI attitude and accent, because, you see, her mum is in Australia and divorced, and she is sleeping with a man Jiah can’t stand. Which is why she is made to have no compunction about declaring — I love you, do you love me? She sucks on a lollipop, her pink mouth an O around it. What’s a poor man to do?

First-time actress Jiah is very attractive, very effective, but it is Bachchan who makes Nishabd his own. The movie is Ramu’s ode to Bachchan’s eyes, which express multitudinous feelings in the space of a scene: regret, desire, love, longing. Pity his character had to cop out.