Phillum noir

MARQUEE

Though the "film noir" genre comprises movies made around the world and over many decades, the term is best associated with a certain type of Hollywood film of the 1940s. The plots varied, but many of these had a cynical, world-weary detective as the protagonist "" the archetype being Sam Spade, as played by Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. (Incidentally, the adjective most often used in film literature to describe this character is "hardboiled", which gives me a disturbing mental image of the suave Bogey, cigar in hand, wearing an Easter egg costume at a carnival.)

There would also be a femme fatale, a mysterious woman whose integrity the hero can never be certain about but whom he has to trust, because the other people around them "" underworld goons, hitmen, crooked cops "" are decidedly bad pennies.

In short, not a nice, sunny world, and this was reflected in the stygian look of these films. When I think of film noir, I think of smoky black-and-white cinematography and indistinct figures lurking in dark shadows.

It's a legend that has been cemented by poster designs and iconic movie stills, so that it's easy to forget that many excellent noir films have been made in colour "" such as Roman Polanski's Chinatown, about a private eye investigating sleaze and corruption in the Los Angeles water department.

Navdeep Singh's Manorama Six Feet Under works with the template of Chinatown, but it uses that template selectively and intelligently. Watching it, one never gets the impression that the plot of an American film has been arbitrarily picked up and shifted to an Indian setting.

The atmospheric opening scene gives us a tracking shot of ants scurrying over the parched ground, children huddled together near a small fire, and an overhead view of junior engineer Satyaveer Randhawa (Abhay Deol) exiting the door of a PWD site office and walking unhurriedly to his new motorcycle.

In voiceover, Satyaveer tells us that his own life is as arid as his hometown Lakhot. He has just been suspended for taking an unauthorised "commission" ""everyone does it, but he was silly enough to get caught "" and from here on the film's trajectory is a spiral that leads from minor transgressions to increasingly serious crimes.

When a woman who says she's the wife of a powerful local minister asks Satyaveer to play detective for her (because he writes pulp mystery novels on the side), he is caught in a labyrinth of deception and counter deception.

Circumscribed small-town lives, corrupt politicians and policemen, social workers with their own agendas, chuckling thugs who enjoy bantering nearly as much as breaking people's fingers "" all these elements come together with deadly results.

This is an intelligent, accomplished film, anchored by a nicely underplayed performance by Abhay Deol, who is proving one of the most interesting actors of his generation (and the most low-key Deol since the first five or six years of Dharmendra's career).

It's the latest in a line of very interesting movies (Sriram Raghavan's Johnny Gaddaar and Anurag Kashyap's No Smoking being others) that haven't done well on commercial release but which seem likely to acquire cult followings on DVD.

Manorama... is also a reminder that a film in this genre doesn't have to be shot entirely in shadows; that the nighttime in question (noir is French for "black") is principally the nighttime of the soul, and the dark side of human nature can be on view even in the blinding sunlight of the Rajasthani desert.

Manorama Six Feet Under is as good an Indian noir as one could wish to see.

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