Panag too is steadily finding her feet in the world of low-key cinema, played straight and fine. Raima Sen is a strong actress, in an interesting role.
As is often with intelligent actors, he knows how to be natural without pushing for histrionics, and works the understated character perfectly. Ībhay is a candid, extremely credible actor. It's all there: the double-crossing, the false identity, the nose-break (though I wish Singh had himself jumped onto screen to slash it, just like Polanski's cameo) and the resultant bandage, the incest, the blackmail and surprisingly enough even the water issues, the original film being set around the California Water Wars.
It's tremendously hard to discuss this film without constantly paralleling it with Chinatown. As the noir genre demands, one thing twistily leads to another. You're the closest we have,' she explains,' a writer who writes about detectives.'Īnd so it is that SV, tempted by unexpected adventure and a well-timed stack of banknotes, decides to go hide in the bushes and take a few pictures. 'Because in a town this small, we don't have private detectives. Why me, the unemployed writer justifiably asks. A soberly-clad Sarika breezes in and introduces herself as the Minister's wife, and says she needs SV to spy on her husband. Only this isn't the stuff of Philip Marlowe. It is then that he sits and wonders what to do with his bitter, sarcastic wife ( Gul Panag) and annoyingly energetic son when the door knocks and the femme fatale enters. His one attempt at a novel - Manorama, the pulpiest of fiction with a lurid cover making the beautiful Hindi word ' upanyas' sound shameful - sold just 200 copies. He's guilty - the fee lies parked outside his house, on two modest wheels - and a failed novelist. And yet Manorama Six Feet Under stands out as a dusty recreation of a superb film, crafted with earthy ingenuity.įor those who haven't seen Chinatown, this Hindi version is a strong, well-executed, tight thriller.ĭeol's character, Satyaveer Singh, is built in distinct contrast to Nicholson's unforgettable JJ Gittes, a tough yet cultured and well-off investigator, while SV, when we first meet him, is a junior engineer just fired for having accepted a bribe. Small-town Rajasthan is no Los Angeles, and Abhay Deol is no Jack Nicholson. If great theatre can be timeless - the Bard is freshly recycled on stage or screen somewhere in the world every single week - the same must hold true for great cinema.įollowing the thought that a fantastic screenplay is open to as much reinterpretation as a play, debutant director Navdeep Singh takes the tribute route by basing his first film on Roman Polanski's 1974 classic, Chinatown.