REVIEW 16: SAAT KHOON MAAF

Release date: February 18, 2011

Director: Vishal Bhardwaj

Cast: Priyanka Chopra, Neil Nitin Mukesh, John Abraham, Irrfan Khan, Aleksandr Dyachenko, Annu Kapoor, Naseeruddin Shah, Usha Uthup, Vivaan Shah, Konkona Sensharma, Ruskin Bond

I don’t know about you, but I’ve met people like Susanna – men and women who seem incapable of being single. Even before the ink dries on the end of one relationship, they’re on to another … and then another … Perhaps dreading the prospect of attending that next party without a companion? ... Perhaps dreading being alone more than the loneliness in a bad relationship?

But Susanna Anna-Marie Johannes is also unlike anyone I’ve met. She doesn’t simply flit from one partner to another, she kills one husband to merrily move on to the next … and the next...

Vishal Bhardwaj’s Saat Khoon Maaf is based on Ruskin Bond’s short story Susanna’s Seven Husbands. And though the quirkiness of Bond’s tale gets very well translated into celluloid here, SKM lacks the depth that you’d expect from a Vishal project that turns a merely-seven-page literary work into a two-and-a-half-hour film.

It begins really well. Susanna is married to Major Edwin Rodriques, a brave soldier who is a dour control freak at home. He has just lost a leg in war. She’s young, wealthy, beautiful, desirable. His insecurity leads to repeated assaults on his wife and those around her. Until one day, she conspires with her crazily loyal band of servants to put an end to her own misery. Rodriques dies in a hunting “accident” and the mourning widow spots Husband No. 2 in the choir at the funeral. You get the picture? 

The beauty of Susanna’s character is that she seems not to have a personality or identity of her own. She is who her husband is or wants her to be, sometimes to comical effect. For Rodriques, she’s a cowering, servile army wife. With her singer husband Jamshed Singh Rathore a.k.a. Jimmy Stetson, she becomes a rock chick in mini-skirts. For the poet Mohammed Wasiullah Khan she converts to Islam and becomes Sultana who loves Urdu verse herself. When she recites some lines to him and he responds with “muqarrar”, she asks innocently, “woh kaun hai?” To the Russian Andre she introduces herself as Anna, not Susanna, announces that she loves Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, speaks the language, sings and dances to Russian tunes. Since we already know she’s going to knock off each of her men, it was her own metamorphosis into a new creature with every marriage that I started looking forward to and enjoying.  

But it was not enough. So okay, I got the point that each husband had a nasty side to him. But as Susanna’s foster child asks her mid-way through the film: why did you have to kill a man when you could have just left him? Why indeed?

Was Susanna merely a maniac? That certainly doesn’t come across in the first half of the film in which I found myself sympathising with her. Besides, her voiceover tells us that she’s a woman seeking true love. But as we all know, it takes a lot for a human being to kill another. What is it that made her commit that first crime when she could just as well have walked out on the man? And what insecurities led her to mould herself to each man, never seeking herself as a person?

It was the answer to that last question and an insight into the complexities of Susanna’s character that could have made SKM a great film. What I got instead was an exciting, eerie and amusing first half in which I thought I’d get my answers in Part 2; but the predictable string of murders in the second half told me nothing new about the woman.

There’s also a disappointing literalness to Bhardwaj’s storytelling in places. Where is the director whose Omkara gave us one of the most sinister Iagos that any Shakespearean interpretation in the world has delivered? At one point in Saat Khoon Maaf, we’re shown a spider (I guess a black widow?) crawling across a table in Susanna’s room. Really, Vishal! The policeman seeking sexual favours from Susanna in exchange for a cover-up bears the name Keemat Lal. Keemat, get it?!! And the dance with Jesus in the end is downright silly. Vishal!!!

Priyanka Chopra as Susanna is sufficiently cute, lively, terrified, hurt, angry, cruel and penitent by turns. But the script doesn’t give her enough meat to dig her teeth into and deliver any measure of brilliance on screen. Worse, her ageing make-up is terrible! If she shines at any point, it is as the wife of the sexually obsessed cop who is the only husband she marries out of practical compulsions, not choice. Her revulsion for him is unspoken. She also brings a delightfully maniacal tone to her final relationship. “I’m going to drink his blood,” she yells. Oh mama!

Annu Kapoor is my pick of the men: as the lustful, opportunistic policeman obsessed with this lethal woman, he is manipulative and helpless in equal measure. Neil Nitin Mukesh comes a close second as the mean Major.

The intricacies that are sorely missing in Susanna’s characterisation show up wonderfully elsewhere in SKM. In an industry obsessed with perfect bodies, Vishal inspires his stars to shed their fears with their clothes. When Neil takes off his shirt for a duel, we actually see tyres on his torso. When Priyanka drops her top for a younger man, what we get is not the tiny waist of a gym-fixated actress but a very nice body belonging to a real woman. And John Abraham blithely risks his macho image when he puts on a woman’s slip.

As for the music, well Darrrrling, it is infectious! And the Christian hymns are impeccably researched! Churches in Hindi films are usually accompanied by the clichéd sounds of the pipe organ and voices always resembling Mother Superior from Sound of Music. In SKM, Vishal (also the music director) picks precisely the right hymn for every occasion. So it’s Lord I’m Coming Home and Nearer My God To Thee at funerals and O Perfect Love at a wedding. Beautiful!

So despite SKM’s disappointing second half, I’ll recommend it to you for the quirky first half, for Priyanka Chopra and Annu Kapoor, and for the wonderful detailing in the music. Like Susanna the serial marry-er, I entered the preview theatre hoping to fall in love. I came away liking much about Saat Khoon Maaf, but am I passionate about it? Sadly, no.

Rating (out of five): **9/10