Dobaaraa, never again, please!

It is very difficult to assess the actual damage done to human psyche by Anurag Kashyap’s latest creation. Luckily,  there were only nine people in the theatre when I saw the film on Friday, and  four of them were with me. I would say, the less the audience for such pretentious, phoney films, the more the chances of humanity surviving the collective cataclysm of a creative artiste who seems to have lost connect with his core audience.

Anurag Kashyap’s USP is his deep-rooted affinity to the violent hinterland of North India, where guns rule over the vast stretches of godforsaken parched bloodthirsty land. Into this trigger-happy No Country For Old Men that Kashyap created over the years, came the soft gentle supple tender Manmarziyaan in 2018 to which I said , ‘Nozzle na lag jaye.’

Anurag Kashyap and his  Manmarziyaan leading lady Taapsee Pannu are back together with Dobaaraa(okay, I promise no more dobaaraa-entendres). This time, the end result, though, again, relatively free from the Kashyapian quality of violence, is far less satisfying than Manmarziyaan. In fact, Dobaaraa is pretty much catastrophic and by far the most garbled, incoherent film that Kashyap has thrashed out in his illustrious career.

Where does Dobaaraa not go wrong? That is a much tougher question to answer than the reverse. The degrees of  plunging fortunes that Dobaaraa experiences in the course of its two-hour-fifteen-minute running time are epic. The film, alas, is far from epic. The very basis of the time-travel  theme is shaky. A boy witnesses a murder in his neighbour’s home at exactly 2.12 am (hence Do Baaraa, get it?).

What follows from there is indescribably tragic in ways that have nothing to do with the characters. So what is  Dobaaraa about? This question may take hours, perhaps days or even weeks and months to answer. For all we know, Dobaaraa may one day, be recognized as one of the great classics of world cinema. But let's not jump –and here comes Kashyap’s favourite instrument of creativity—the  gun.

Future interpretations notwithstanding, Dobaaraa seems to be a monstrous misfire, with  Taapsee Pannu struggling to lend a semblance of credibility to a screenplay that jumps from the era of the VCR to the laptop without humour or  irony. Antara (Pannu) is connected via an old television set with a boy named Anay, who wears Terminator T-shirts and snoops around an adulterous neighbour’s home, whose door is always ajar in spite of the murderous activities inside.

Wait. I am  just starting on the absurdities. And this may take longer than I expected. Suffice to say that the theme of time travel should be left to the imagination. Visual manifestations of  H G Wells require the vision of a David Lean  and a sense of fun and celebration experienced in the Back To The Future films.

Dobaaraa is near-bankrupt in vision and humour. It’s all meant to be taken dead seriously, even when Taapsee Pannu playing a nurse (with a nose-ring) shows up on screen as Taapsee Pannu playing a doctor (without a nose ring). No one recognizes her, although she recognizes everyone including a husband (the underrated Rahul Bhat), who claims he has never seen her before. A young investigative cop (well played by Pavail Gulati), seems to have the hots for the heroine, though she doesn’t know it. How can she? Busy as she is trying to figure out which era in time she belongs to. I too, was doing my own calculation as to where this film belongs. I came up with ‘timeless’(accompanied by canned laughter).

I almost expected the entire cast to show up in a room together shouting ‘Happy April Fool’s Day’. But no. We are in  this for the drama of time-travelled  travail, not laughter. And the drama, I am afraid, is as sapped of life and blood as that cake that was left out in the rain in the song I Remember Yesterday.

Anurag Kashyap’s yesterdays, when he owned the violent county, certainly seem sweatier and more real than this deodorized, diluted, dead-on-arrival drama of afterlife in Dobaaraa. Taapsee Pannu struggles hard to keep it going; some of the supporting cast comprising underutilized talent is interesting. Saswata Chatterjee has to actually sit in front of the cops and justify why he needed to chop up his wife’s body after murdering her.

He fails to convince us. He is not alone. Nothing in this cheerless loopy romp into a time-loop, (Taapsee did this earlier with far more engaging results in Loop Lapeta) offers any kind of satisfaction for the audience. I hope it was a better experience for Kashyap and his team.

Why remake a bad Spanish film when there are so many bad films to be remade in our own country?

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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