Delhi 6

Basking in the success of Rang De Basanti (RDB), Rakesh Omprakash Mehra decided to indulge in some nostalgia. Great films have come out of nostalgia, and Delhi with its old world charm (imagined and real), invites one to explore its narrow lanes that carry quaint names, to seek stories hiding behind high walls and close-set windows, and to regret the loss of a way of life as old as the precariously hanging wrought iron balconies.

Mehra’s memory of his early years in old Delhi serves him well in getting several elements right. He warmly recreates public spaces of old Delhi where a democratic co-existence of sorts exist, be it hand carts, cycle rikshaws, motorcycles, tongas and luxury cars all laying claim to the same tight space and at the same time. Here the quickest way to the hospital could well be a cycle rickshaw, where the traffic and every other business can wait to witness a cow delivering a calf. He also displays the delicately balanced coexistence of communities where a Muslim confectioner is acceptable but a dalit Hindu cleaner is an outcaste, where temples face mosques, and where Ramlila is an occasion to indulge in spirituality, but also in gossip and politics. It is a place where the local thanedaar rules and rumours bridge the gap between fiction and reality.

But memories are for memoirs. And in their broken, tinted, dissociated forms they are at best like dough, waiting to be shaped into a meaningful story. The difficulty with Delhi 6 is that it is a collection of images. Mehra uses an entire first half of the film for a ‘winter-afternoon-on-the-terrace’ reverie. People hug each other, eat jalebis, fly kites; children play gulli cricket and smoke in dark alleys; women make pickles and sing songs. Only towards the interval point and in the beginning of second half of the film you do realize that many early scenes were set ups and they start to acquiesce meanings. But then I found the meanings (the pay offs) to be equally problematic if not more – the ensemble of images, characters and moments now yield a simplistic tale of importance of communal harmony and killing your inner demons. So the protagonist, Roshan (Abhishek Bachchan) ends up playing Christ-like martyr and enlightens people that there are gods and monkeys (devils) inside everybody. And if you kill this monkey (Ravan) things will be fine again.

I suspect the ‘success of message’ in RDB, obliged Mehra to belt out another strong one this time. The similarities with Mehra’s much celebrated Rang De Basanti are uncanny. Here again the narrator arrives from abroad, interacts with half-a-dozen characters (strongly defined, with well-built character graphs), identify a problem and help set the house in order. In RDB, Mehra had successfully intertwined the reel and real lives of his characters and here too he tries to a similar thing by inter-cutting the narrative with Ramlila that is being staged in the neighbourhood and the news clips of an ‘invisible’ monkey man that has caused menace in the walled city.

But the artistic device that had heightened the drama in RDB fails to launch or at least work to give the same impact as in RDB. The Ramlila episodes don’t do much for the narrative, because the references and associations made are too simplistic. On the other hand, the ‘monkey man’ episode constantly being reported on television provides the ‘farcical’ thread to the film’s narrative and, in my opinion, is one of the best aspects of film, both at the narrative level and as a cinematic language. I can only wish that the lightheartedness this aspect of the film provided was not compromised with heavy handed and staged ‘preachings’ towards the end.

An ensemble of characters (played by talents like OM PURI, DIVYA DUTTA, Pavan Malhotra Deepak Dobriyal, Atul Kulkarni, Vijay Raaz, Cyrus Sahukar, even Rishi Kapoor) fill up the screen and just about all actors are in good form and give credible performances, and this is a major strength for the film. Abhishek Bachchan carries a calm and likeable presence (so much so that the director forces his own hands to rescue him from the dead in the end). Sonam Kapoor looks ravishing if underused.

A.R. Rahman background score is ‘regular’ music. The best song of the film Genda phool looks out of place in the film (a UP song bursting in the middle of nowhere), as do all the early songs (however, the song where Roshan mixes Delhi and New York in his head is conceptually and visually noteworthy). Binod Pradhan’s photography is first-rate and strikes a balance between giving a realist feel with good looking frames.

Delhi 6 is an honest effort but ends up as an immature indulgence in nostalgia with simplistic ‘live-in-harmony’ messages.