Andhadhun
There seems to me a generational divide in different audiences’ expectations leading up to watching a film. There’s a large contingent of younger viewers who prefer, hands held, to know beforehand nearly every major event in a feature film’s story. The internet is awash with news sites dribbling out plot elements of works in progress, abetted by leaked scripts.
My ideal way of watching a film, on the other hand, is to know as little about it as possible. I trust, until proven otherwise, that the director of the film is capable of surprising me, even delighting me, in the manner of an artful magician. By this standard, director Sriram Raghavan has pulled a huge rabbit out of a hat.
After a surreal and intriguing outdoor sequence later revisited, the Indian film Andhadhun (translated as “The Blind Melody”) begins as what could have been a romantic comedy. Akash (Ayushmann Khurrana) is a dashing, young, blind pianist living on his own and working on a (mediocre-sounding) semi-classical piece he wants to premiere in London. One day he’s knocked to the ground on a city street by Sophie (Radhika Apte) on her motor bike. They tentatively become friends and she offers to get him a piano playing gig at her at her father’s restaurant. Her father, Pramod Sinha (Anil Dhawan), was once a famous actor, singer and movie star (Andhadhun features clips from earlier Indian films Dhawan starred in, dating back to the ’70s, and they all look deliciously entertaining). Pramod is married to a much younger woman, the beautiful Simi (played by Tabu).
When the friendly and appreciative Pramod (Akash remembers songs Pramod used to sing as a film star) invites Akash to his apartment for a private performance for Simi and himself, the story takes a turn; a great crime has been committed and Simi and a corrupt police inspector (Manav Vij) rely on Akash’s blindness to attempt to get away with it. It’s here that director Raghavan plays his true hand: Andhadhun is a twisted, comedic crime thriller in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock; not Hitchcock’s famous extravaganzas, but his lighter, more modest early (British) and late films. Andhadhun specifically evokes, for me, Hitchcock’s last two films, Frenzy (1972) and Family Plot (1976), with their simmering mixtures of wicked humor, domestic intrigue, and cold-blooded murder.
Without revealing more plot, Andhadhun is a film surprisingly tight for its running length (138 minutes —it even includes an intermission). Every early scene and character shown becomes integral to the plot. Andhadhun reveals a lived in world. Side characters are given dialogue hinting at lives and relationships we only get glimpses of. I even enjoyed the music. One montage song, “Oh Bhai Re”, by Shadeb Faridi, Aktamash Farid and Amit Trivedi is downright infectious.
There were scenes in Andhadhun which made me gasp in surprise and others which made me laugh—and sometimes both. That’s a directing gift to be appreciated.
—Michael R. Neno, 2019 Aug 8