The physicality of Sriram Raghavan’s Andhadhun is clever and audacious, but it’s the psychology that transforms the film into more than just a crafty thriller. At the heart of the wicked narrative lies the blind obsession of an artist. Cinema has long been obsessed with the motif of the flawed artist. But Andhadhun presents the flawed artist – protagonist Akash (Ayushmann Khurana), and director Raghavan himself – obsessed with the motifs of cinema.
Deception 101
Cinema is a story told to marry the personality of perspective with the subjectivity of perception. Akash, a visually challenged pianist, knows that the world is kinder to adulterated talent. It is then revealed early on that Akash isn’t actually blind. He believes the pretense helps him focus better. But his entire life is an elaborate act, cinema, to elevate the perception of those who encounter his music. His situation is inadvertently reflective of the filmmaker’s — a man who, with his genteel salt-and-peppery mop of curly hair, looks nothing like the stereotypical image we tend to associate with the minds of eccentric thrillers. Furthermore, by punctuating the film with retro cues, — Yeh jo mohabbat hai, Amit Trivedi’s pulpy ‘70s-style score, Beethoven’s fifth (the composer’s deafness is another nod to Akash’s motive) – he tries to gentrify the viewer’s perception of emotional beats so that we interpret a perplexing tragedy as a black comedy. So that we admire it, rather than get affected by it.
This way, Akash remains a man of the movies, an anti-hero so inherently theatrical that the real art lies in his commitment to deception. By acting handicapped, he establishes the illusion of an underdog to alter a listener’s impression of his skills. The dark glasses are his performance-enhancing drug — even if the enhancement of his performance lies in the eyes of the beholder.
The success of Andhadhun lies in its ability to humanise, and ground, Akash’s twisted pursuit of immortality. Till he stumbles upon a murder scene, his sacrifices — of plain sight, of instincts, normalcy and social fluency — are the stuff of legends.
Unraveling the tale
The shrewdest scene of Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige involves two young magicians, Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) and Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman), watching the show of a frail old Chinese magician, Chung Ling Soo, to unravel the mystery of a trick featuring a large fish bowl. They can’t figure it out. After the show, Borden observes the man gingerly amble to his carriage. He suspects that the key to everyone’s reaction lay not in Soo’s magic, but in their perception of his life. “That,” he remarks, while pointing to Soo’s crouched, decrepit body, “is his greatest performance.” He is right. Chung Ling Soo, unbeknownst to fans, was in fact the stage name of American magician William Robinson. What started out as a parody of another Chinese magician eventually assumed the guise of a full-blown identity — an aura the 50-something performer obsessively maintained all across Europe.
Robinson even made up a sad backstory, a dead Cantonese mentor, and performed with a ‘Chinese wife’ (also an American woman) to further the novelty of his image. He never spoke on stage. Many learned of his real identity only in his final moments during an accident on stage; his last words were in English. Borden, as is later revealed, mirrors Robinson’s strategy to a T. He even goes so far as to hide the lifelong existence of a twin brother — an off-stage performance, an artful lie, one that illuminates the perception of his on-stage genius.
Infected with morality
In his head Akash is both Borden and Robinson. But he is imperfect at imitating imperfection. He wears lenses, forsakes the honesty of love and cooks up a cricket-ball accident to amplify the integrity of his craft. He aspires to be as fanatical as a rockstar that fakes his own death to sell records. Except, as Raghavan so subversively demonstrates in Andhadhun, in a country like India even the most cinematic schemes can get infected with morality.
The film, with its serendipitous events and messy intellects, is designed is designed to paint villainy (duping the world) with the brush of heroism (trying to survive an ordeal in order to dupe the fickle world). Perspective is everything.
To paraphrase the closing monologue of Nolan’s movie: We want to be fooled. We’re not really looking. Making something – like our perception of Akash’s “vision” and art – disappear isn’t enough. You have to bring it back. The final shot, by crook more than hook, does that. It is the enduring prestige of Andhadhun.