On "Lootera"

(Warning: Mild Spoilers Ahead!)

Vikramaditya Motwane's Lootera is a masterwork of melancholy. The director achieves a note of pure, precise sadness in this stylish exploration of love and betrayal (his second feature after the much-feted Udaan). Not for him the messy, tragicomic exuberance of the recent Raanjhanaa, or the drunken, excessive glamour of former mentor Sanjay Leela Bhansali's oeuvre (although he has clearly learnt from the latter how to set tone and mastermind mood with painterly care and to send the tension climbing skyward with a grand, merciless score.) Motwane is after an astonishing sort of movie-making economy. There is no fat, not a wasted breath. His fifties-set love story has the accelerating thump of a first-rate thriller and the elegantly inexorable narrative drive of Greek tragedy. 

Motwane is a filmmaker of preternatural restraint. He is neither precious nor overbearing with the period detail. (All of it - the folds of pastel taant and gem-hued silk on Sonakshi, the lamplit gloom of the zamindar-bari and its dark, heavy furniture, the muted gleam of centuries-old idols, the genteel floral upholstery of the Dalhousie vacation-home - is judiciously, assiduously staged and filmed.) There is not a single misstep, never a moment when the film veers out of control, even though his story itself is one of universes upended. Pakhi, the amiably spoilt daughter of a West Bengal zamindar has her pleasant, narrow life stirred by the arrival of a mysterious, handsome archaeologist, while her father, the aging aristocrat (played by Barun Chanda with the perfect blend of decaying refinement and tragic befuddlement), reluctantly gives in to the realization that the world is no longer as he once knew it. Quiet, soft-spoken Varun Srivastav (Ranveer Singh), who turns out to be the titular thief, is shaken by his growing attraction to Pakhi, even as she pursues him with adorably dogged determination. He flees from his love and hers, leaving Pakhi's life in ruins. The misfortunes keep coming, as do Amit Trivedi's songs, which are shot through with the golden, yearning, Bengal-inflected sweetness of S.D. Burman's melodies and the moist ache of R.D. Burman's work in films like Ijaazat and Masoom.

The material is the stuff of high romantic tragedy, but all my blather about economy and restraint may have conveyed to you a worrying sense of bloodlessness, an absence of a pulse in the film. Let me reassure you, then, that Lootera's heartbeat can be heard clarion-clear over its exquisite silences. Motwane tends to the love story at the center of his film with a gentle wit and a sorrowful quietude that reminded me of Gulzar's films of the seventies and eighties. Pakhi initiates the flirtation with Varun by asking him to give her painting lessons. She is soon the teacher, instructing him in a charming, summery interlude that will return only as stinging memory in the film's winter-sieged post-intermission portion. We really do want this pair of fragile young creatures - he, with his troubled eyes, she with her hope-starred half-smile - to make it, even though the coughing fit that ominously opens the film and the dark fable that follows it inform us that they might not, probably will not. Yet we watch, entranced, not least because of the lead pair.

Always a fun presence in dire movies, Sonakshi Sinha here is great in a way that I don't think any of her peers could manage. Her Pakhi is, true to the name, birdlike; impetuous and inquisitive, lively with mischief, pampered and happy, but eager to explore beyond the confines of her small, virgin world. Sonakshi is a terrific comedienne, getting some big laughs in the first half with those saucer eyes and that clever, teasing way of hers. She pouts magnificently in the early parts, but the endearing sulks of the first half become a furious, broken reproachfulness directed toward Ranveer Singh's character in the second. Ranveer's performance is all darkened stillness, his voice often almost disappearing into soundlessness, but it is a stillness riven by the heartache of the chronically unloved, the abandoned. Ranveer is a fearless, searching actor. Even in the low-key solemnity asked of him, he manages to find and illuminate shade upon shade in his character. He is feral with desperation, mad with guilt, and ultimately bright with purpose. He and Sonakshi set each other alight, whether they're caught in a voluptuous embrace or locked in ferocious battle.

A slender vein of redemption runs rapidly through Lootera's ending, and then it is all over. This is not a film that ends with you overwhelmed, awash in image and sound, even though Lootera's images and sounds are beautiful, memorable. It is a film that leaves a sigh in its wake and continues to trail softly through your mind long after you've watched it.