akshay shah

Another another from PFC..

Manorama – an Addendum & a Re-View :
PFC
Star Comics, in the 80’s, used to run a series of titles around Sunny Gavaskar & his myriad adventures. There Sunil Gavaskar would tackle his villains with great aplomb & still make it in time to lead India at the cricket stadium where Sunny would take on different kind of monsters in plotting victory for India. Sunny was a detective too but a cricketer first. And he, in the Comics, didn’t have to hide/moonlight his detective side. Most of these adventures would culminate in Sunny saving the World from the baddies & be ready for the toss at the Brabourne with his opposite numbers Ian Botham or Viv Richards. Fans of other prominent members of the then Indian Cricket team were hopeful of their favorite cricketer unleashing their Detective/ Superhero abilities too. With ‘Manorama SFU’ you suddenly wonder if Dilip Vengsarkar has indeed made his fictional avatar, played by his almost look-alike – a mustachioed Abhay Deol.

Likewise, in ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’ Umberto Eco talks of one of his protagonists [Causabon] being the ‘Sam Spade of Publishing’. We’ve had Bogart playing Hammett’s immortal Detective Sam Spade in John Huston’s ‘Maltese Falcon’ but I wondered if a ‘Sam Spade of Publishing’ has ever graced the screen, and when he eventually did what he looked like & went about doing. In Navdeep’s ‘Manorama SFU’ we stumble upon Abhay Deol’s SatyaVeer Randhawa who’s a very very likely candidate. SV, as Abhay Deol’s gorgeous Screen wife Gul Panag calls him, is a Self-published writer of a ‘failure of a Detective Novel’ called ‘Manorama’. As the film progresses one inevitably wonders what kind of a novel ‘Manorama’ is. Inevitable ‘coz the novel figures more than once as a crucial clue in the Detective’s journey in the film. We learn that SV seems to have had great ambitions for himself as a writer, having the confident assurance of revealing to his readers the Where exactly [& the When] of the titular protagonist Manorama’s death. And this information SV teases in the 32nd page of a book that weighs atleast 300 pages.

The world of Self-published writing operates like this:

You write a book. You take it to publishers. Your talent indifferentiated, you’re asked about your earlier published work. You tell them that this present work would be the ‘previous published book’ for future publishers. Not good enough. Eventually you’re doled-out a condescending publishing-deal where you supposedly meet half the cost for the book’s publication in exchange for a promise to split profits two-ways. In reality what you’ve got yourself into is bearing the whole cost of the publication process, & never in control of the book’s sales figures. The publisher prints a limited number, and owing to its poor marketing & placement you end up with the responsibility of selling about half the printed number of books. Most writers make a bonfire of their vanity with the remainder of the books [should find out what Oz did with his ‘The MBA Gang’].

What SV in ‘Manorama SFU’ has smartly done is create his own doppelganger by writing ‘Manorama’ with a pen-name. And it is this particular side to him that brings him back the investment on his book – his first commissioned detective work pays him money in excess of what he might have had to accrue on his first novel. This pen-name also buys him access to a PRESS CARD that legitimizes his nosing-around activity. The timing couldn’t have been any perfecter. SV happens to be a Public Servant in the middle of an enquiry into his bribe-taking & hence asked to cool his heels off of work. We have in SV a very interesting Noir Detective – A Public Servant & a Private Investigator.
Public Ear – Private Eye.

Noir Cinema with a detective as its protagonist requires the film to begin its proceedings with the commissioning of an investigation that hires the Detective to snoop & dig around as much as he is capable of. Ability to handle the unraveling plays as important a role as skills in detection. What applies to the detective also does apply to the audience. The film then becomes an existential journey of the Detective, & the viewer’s too. There is a constant mutual catch-up that exists between what the detective knows & what the viewer does. Navdeep’s detective is very generous, in sharing whatever he comes to find-out with the viewer.

A-nother Noir Cinema convention has been its period setting. Though ‘Manorama’ is set in our present time it feels & plays like a period piece. This effect is achieved immediately in Locating the film in small-town India that seems to look, feel, smell & sound like lagging a couple of decades behind the India of the cities. The difficulty in making a Detective do Detective work is evidenced in the film’s END Credits where the Security for the filming Cast & Crew seems to have been provided by ‘Trinity Investigators’. India is a country that is swarming with Detective Agencies that mostly do ‘Security Servicing’ & ‘Matrimonial Testimonializing’.

It is indeed commendable to be pulling-off a genre of cinema that has no precedental tradition in the country. ‘Manorama SFU’ does that with great performances & delicate crafting. ‘Manorama SFU’ is a Noir film that also qualifies as a Western & a RoadMovie at the sametime. A RoadMovie that promptly warns you – that the Road here is a Mirage.

More reasons to check-out ‘Manorama SFU’:

An interiorising Abhay Deol deftly guiding you through the journey.

Gul Panag playing Abhay’s delicious wife.
Raima Sen teaching the advantages of small things such as an aquarium & Ludo game as seduction-accessories.

Sarika as an adventuress who’d probably go after a man claimed by her astrologer to have been the love of her life in her previous birth in remote Alexandria.

Yana Gupta as the stuff that fantasies are made of.
A crackle of a Vinay Pathak. Whoever came-up with his lines!