A thriller on a serial killer who targets critics – I had a good laugh when I learnt of the theme of Chup: Revenge of the Artist since it sounded like certain filmmakers’ fantasy more than a concept for a film. It took me back to an interview in which director Rohit Shetty had told me he views critics as “frustrated people” and “vultures”, adding: “…a few of them are even scared to meet me because they know that the moment I meet them, I’m going to thrash them and go to jail for a day.” (Source: The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic)
So yeah, the theme is unwittingly funny although it is dead serious. For the record, Chup! is not directed by Rohit, but by R. Balki (Shamitabh, Ki & Ka, Padman) who has also written the story. The screenplay and dialogues are by Balki, Raja Sen and Rishi Virmani. And the mystery in the foreground is spun into a tribute to the film icon Guru Dutt whose Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959) was famously trashed by critics and rejected by the audience, only to attain a cult status decades afterwards. He never officially directed a film again but is rumoured to have ghost directed the ones he produced in subsequent years, before dying tragically in 1964.
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.
A senior Mumbai policeman (Sunny Deol) in Chup is desperately trying to solve a series of gruesome murders of film critics. While he conducts his investigation, in the same city a young journalist called Nila (Shreya Dhanwanthary) dreams of becoming a critic. Nila meets a florist (Dulquer Salmaan), and they are immediately drawn to each other.
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.
DQ, as the young superstar is known to fans, has made some excellent choices in Malayalam cinema during his decade-long career, with forays into Tamil and Telugu that have stood him in good stead. He is way better than any of the Hindi films he has done. Despite its positives, Chup’s aspirations to grandeur make it far less engaging than its uncommon theme might suggest. Balki’s film fails to grasp the essence of Guru Dutt’s magic, which was rooted not merely in the beauty of visuals and music, but in the ability to use both to capture the pain, mischief, sense of humour, love and longing of his characters with empathy. In contrast, Chup feels distant from its characters and uninvolved.
Rating: 2.5 (out of 5 stars)
Chup: Revenge of the Artist is now in theatres
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
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