No Smoking

Written and Directed by: Anurag Kashyap
Produced by: Vishal Bharadwaj and Kumar Mangat
Cast: John Abraham, Ranvir Shorey, Ayesha Takia, and Paresh Rawal

The protagonist of No Smoking, K (John Abraham, in a namesake role as Franz Kafka’s protagonist in The Trial) is a smoker who refuses to give up. His family and friends try every means to get him off it while he cannot see what the fuss is all about. However, when his wife (Ayesha Takia) threatens to leave him for good, he agrees to get help from one Baba Bengali (Paresh Rawal), referred to him by his best friend (Ranvir Shorey). Baba Bengali runs an underground quit smoking laboratory, and once caught in his scheme of things, life becomes a nightmare for K. K’s surreal journey from there on defies logic, and the world, with all its friends and foes, seems to be closing in on him. Baba Bengali spells out a series of brutal rules, on what punishment K will be given for every cigarette he smokes. With the all-seeing, policing eyes on him, K has nowhere to hide and take his daily dose of cigarette. He tries to run away, even retaliate, but he doesn’t have a chance. The paranoia and the frustration splits K’s consciousness. And finally even his soul is taken away, just like Baba Bengali had warned.

K’s exasperation, confusion and desperation will be delightfully familiar to those who have ever smoked. However, it may also be frustrating for an audience if No Smoking is seen as just series of plots aimed at making K quit his habit of smoking. On a thematic level, No Smoking is an absurdist’s view of the Universe. The film showcases a universe where nothing is what it seems, where the idea of freedom is illusory, where the boundary between real and imaginary has collapsed, where family threatens, friends betray, society abandons, and one’s own memory plays tricks. Man here is a trapped animal. He can run to Siberia or stand in the middle of Nowhere, he is still being watched and his actions monitored. He would be a fool to think he can choose. He can control his life no more than Hemingway’s ants. It’s Man against Institutions and however much he may try he will not win, for the rules of this game are inherently tyrannical and loaded.

K’s smoking may be an unhealthy habit, but it is also an act of choice, an assertion of independence. His journey from resistance to partial or forced conformism is also a revelation of how the oppressive institutions and rules of society leave no space for individual choice. His family uses emotional arm-twisting to force him to come around their way, his friends hide behind masks of concern and goodwill to ensnare him, and religion persuades him with promises of salvation or threats of damnation into giving up his independence.

In this absurdist’s universe, language too has lost its meaning. Communication is difficult, with the result that what one says doesn’t need to be true, and what one really feels, one cannot say. K and his wife speak to each other in expletives and often in internal monosyllables that appears over their head as text in comic-book balloons! K’s brother, J speaks to him in German, and Baba uses a deceptive and religious phraseology K cannot decrypt. The alienation is complete – the world thinks K is crazy, K thinks the world has gone nuts. No Smoking ends poignantly, showing how the institutional and societal processes eke out the souls from human bodies, and they’re left dummies conforming to the existing rules. To further its point on brutality of these processes, the film shows that it is not the ‘sin’ of smoking that killed our rebel-hero, K’s soul; K’s soul is instead forcefully gas-chambered by Baba’s religious cleansing squad.

John Abraham as K and Paresh Rawal as Bengali Baba give convincing performances. The art and camerawork successfully create the surreal and smoky atmosphere so essential for this film. The photography by Rajeev Ravi is first-rate and the framing imaginative. There is excellent production design by Wasiq Khan (Baba Bengali’s underground laboratory , the call centers, canister-filled alleys, execution chambers, and police interrogation booths remind one of the set pieces from Terry Gilliam’s apocalyptic films like Brazil [1985] and Twelve Monkeys [1995]). The film is supported by well-composed songs. However, the lyrics could have been used to shore up the thematic aspect of the film; presently they work only at the literal level of the narrative.

No Smoking does not fit any popular film genre produced in Bombay. What complicates the reading of the film is it’s inaccessibility. For narratives that work on two levels- literal and symbolic- it is essential that both work independently. That is, the smoker’s story should be strong enough to work on its own without the support of the absurdist interpretation, and vice versa. However, in No Smoking the two often get mixed up, so the smoker’s story gets surreal at times where as human condition, supposed to look meaningless, occasionally acquires meaning! Also, Kashyap should have made use of topical allusions for the audience to relate to the film better. Contemporary and recognizable issues could also have greatly improved the narrative’s accessibility of No Smoking (for example, Kafka and Beckett texts contain references to the oppressive police state).

Nonetheless, this is not a film that can be written off, though some reviewers will try. Try they will, for, often, incomprehension leads to rejection. Anurag Kashyap’s achievement lies in refusing to compromise (making the film’s subject even more apt) and in creating what he believed in. And for helping him produce this novel work, the entire team of No Smoking should be congratulated.

This review now also appears on Passion for Cinema website: http://passionforcinema.com/author/padmaja/