Raima Sen [Images] is a strong actress, in an interesting role. Panag too is steadily finding her feet in the world of low-key cinema, played straight and fine. Vinay Pathak is solid as a liquor-friendly cop, but one laments his lack of screentime. Little needs to be said about Kulbhushan Kharbanda, the veteran still effortlessly able to toss an ice-cube at your spine.
Forget originality Jake, this is Chinatown. This is a noir tribute where fans of the original will have seen it all before, yet sit through this freshly-developed retelling with a smirk on their faces, the kind of smirk that understands why a Chivas and soda could work with daal-baati churma.
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So what does the director do here? Navdeep Singh has crafted a film dripping with nuances of life in a small desert town, and has used the metaphor of the desert to suggest the aridness and sterility of the life of the chief protagonist, Satyaveer Randhawa, underplayed superbly by Abhay Deol.
The film does not have a climax in the conventional sense, which may leave a lot of people feeling highly dissatisfied, but a degree of redemption is achieved by the chief protagonist. Satyaveer Randhawa is again not a hero, he is not the good guy who is absolutely honest and incorruptible, but as the film proceeds, we understand that he is corrupt too. Evil is not vanquished in the end, neither does justice triumph. Evil is something that is at best lived with, because it resides in us and not in the "villain". All that we can do is to come to terms with it and with ourselves.
Satyaveer Randhawa is a junior engineer in the Water department and also the writer (under a pen name) of a thriller novel called Manorama, which manages to sell only two hundred copies. This failure compels him to write for pulp magazines instead. Frustrated and dissatisfied with his existence and the burden of failure, he tries to redeem himself by taking up a mysterious assignment for the wife of a local politician, who wants him to spy on her husband. But then everything is not what it seems and things go haywire, as future events manifest.
The tunnel cave-in near the Tehri Dam has come as a rude shock and raised doubts about safety measures, if any, undertaken by the private company executing the project. There was no clear estimate of the number of the dead and those trapped inside the tunnel. The first day the figure of the dead given out was 13, which almost doubled to 27 the next day. Conflicting versions have surfaced about the cause of the tunnel collapse ranging from a mudslide to water seepage to a technical snag. Already environmentalists are opposed to the construction of big dams, the Tehri incident will provide more ammunition to their fire power.When major projects like the one at Tehri are undertaken, safety of those on the job is supposed to be given top priority. The post-tragedy events do not reveal any coordinated effort to handle the situation. Had there been a regular media briefing by some reliable authority, the speculation about the number of the dead and stranded labourers could have been avoided. Still the flow of information from the site is sketchy. On the positive side, despite a hostile nature, the lives of at least 50 workers were saved. Though not unexpected, the massive rain apparently contributed to the tragedy. As expected, separate sets of inquiry have been ordered by the Centre and the state government. Everyone will have to wait for the outcome to know the exact cause of the accident and safety lapses, if any. The inquiry by the experts will, hopefully, also go into the question of avoiding the recurrence of such incidents in future. The Central government may, in fact, consider setting up a higher-level panel to suggest steps to ensure that such tragedies do not occur again.