Reader TTS

Guru Dutt’s biography is made-for-cinema material, but that is not what Chup is. The story does, however, feature elements from the filmmaker’s life, it overtly references his oeuvre, and in

its technique and narrative style takes inspiration from the late legend.

In the first half of Chup, Balki succeeds in creating an atmosphere of intrigue, with a blend of a deliberately languorous pace that is a curious contrast to the urgency of the police’s

task, Vishal Sinha’s cinematography that is designed to hark back to the great V.K. Murthy’s play with light and shadow in Guru Dutt’s works, and memorable old Hindi film songs including

Jaane kya tune kahi. The suspense lasts for a while after the murderer’s identity is revealed much earlier than you might expect, because the question of why and how next remain.

Despite this, the film’s grip loosens considerably as it rolls along, due to the weakness of the love saga at the centre of these proceedings. Chup is not constructed as a how/whodunnit or a

police procedural, and its impact is heavily dependent on the appeal of Nila’s gradually developing bond with her handsome boyfriend whose eccentricities are made known to the viewer early

on but not to her. The scenes with them, however, seem more focused on looking and sounding like an old-world screen romance than feeling right. Shreya and Dulquer are both capable of fine

acting, but any emotional resonance they might have achieved is overshadowed by the director’s preoccupation with ambience and appearance.

The starting point of their affair is off-putting. When she is still no more than his customer, he follows her home, and one day lands up at her house with a bouquet. Instead of getting

creeped out and/or terrified by such stalking or at the very least, being wary of him as almost every woman I know would be, she invites him in.

Chup gets other things right. Its critique of criticism is largely on point, taking on financially corrupt reviewers, those who act like astrologers predicting a film’s box-office fate, and

those with insufficient knowledge of cinema, all this without coming across as a condescending lecture and without caricaturing individual critics or lampooning the job. Chup is off the mark

though in its portrayal of gender diversity in the profession, depicting the overwhelming majority of Mumbai/Hindi film critics as male, which is not the reality.

In an era when Christians have more or less disappeared from Hindi cinema, Chup gives us a rare protagonist from this religious minority, that too a chap who is shorn of the cringe-worthy

stereotypes of pre-1990s Hindi film Christians back when the community was a familiar presence in stories. The late arrival in Chup of a second significant Christian character who is an

alcoholic gave me pause, since drunkenness was once part of the stereotype, but the normalised representation of the hero without his religious background being over-emphasised has the

effect of turning the other man into just another person with a drinking problem rather than a fellow fitted into the long-prevalent template of Tony The Drunk with the open shirt and

massive cross on his chest who would say “hum God se bolta” and “hum pray karenga”.

The leading lady is southern Indian and of mixed parentage, another primary player’s name suggests that she is Parsi, again both are written and acted sans stereotypes.

That said, Pooja Bhatt’s character has a terribly politically incorrect, fat-shaming explanation for how she arrives at the gender of the murderer, and while I don’t know if psychologists

would agree with her analysis, the tacky manner in which she conveys the point had me sorely missing the intelligent dialogue writing of the American series Criminal Minds that is focused on

serial killings. Pooja’s Zenobia, who specialises in the study of serial killers, gets some of the film’s most poorly written lines, and her acting makes them even more awkward.

Sunny Deol is unusually restrained in Chup until a Gadar-esque moment that ruins everything for him and is strangely out of character for the policeman he plays, when he screams the word

“bastard” into emptiness and leaps out of a building in anger.

Chup never fully rises above being interesting in theory. At one point, Nila makes a crucial career decision that should, logically, have had a strong influence on the murderer’s plans, but

surprisingly, despite a build-up, does not. And the revelation about this violent person’s motivations are clearly intended to be moving, but I found myself struggling to care.

Even Chup’s prettiness wears thin early on. V.K. Murthy’s lighting and cinematography always served to enhance the mood of a film while lending an aura to its characters and luminescence to

their faces. Chup achieves the former in its pre-interval portion, but does not have the same visual outcome. And in the end, when Dulquer is called upon to replicate Guru Dutt’s body

language and postures from well-remembered scenes, the effort is strained.

Rating: 2.5 (out of 5 stars) 

This review was first published when Chup! Revenge of the Artist was released in theatres in September 2022. The film is now streaming on Zee5.

Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other

socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial