Release date:
|
March 22, 2013
|
Director:
|
Suparn Verma
|
Cast:
Language: |
Bipasha Basu,
Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Doyel Dhawan, Shernaz Patel, Mohan Kapur, Tilottama
Shome, Darshan Jariwala, Jaideep Ahlawat
Hindi
|
A woman divorces her physically abusive husband. The man
dies shortly afterwards, returning as a spirit to haunt his wife and reclaim their
child. That, in a nutshell, is the story of Aatma.
Writer-director Suparn Verma’s film begins with the promise of a layered and poignant
tale of domestic violence, a self-respecting woman who brooks no abuse and the
things human beings do when relationships sour. This is the direction the film takes
in the first half, while steering clear of most Bollywood ghost story clichés.
Yes, the background score is actually not
screechy, there’s barely any blood, and no one, but no one, flies in the
air.
Sadly, predictability sets in in the second half. After a
while you can tell from a mile who the spook will target next. By the time the
climax (or rather, anti-climax) comes around, it’s clear the screenplay has failed
to move beyond the potential of the original concept. As things stand, there
are elements worth strongly recommending in Aatma,
but they simply do not all add up.
Element No. 1: Bipasha Basu is in fine form here as Maya
Verma, a woman who takes a broken marriage in her stride but begins to unravel
at the prospect of the loss of her child. It’s also a pleasant change to see
Bipasha in a film that presents her as a natural beauty with minimal makeup and
without the aid of killer gowns or bikinis, just as any great-looking female
professional might be. Doyel Dhawan is charming as little Niya and impresses
with her acting skills, especially in the scene in which she sees her father’s
true colours.
However, it’s a crime to cast Nawazuddin Siddiqui in a
film and then give him the most poorly written part of the lot. Siddiqui plays
Maya’s dead husband Abhay. What were this man’s motivations? What prompted
those fits of rage and the depth of hatred for his wife? We never get to know.
Still, we do get glimpses of Siddiqui’s phenomenal talent in a spooky scene
involving a bathroom and a schoolteacher, and elsewhere, in the only scene that
gives him the canvas he deserves, when the judge awards custody of Niya to Maya
causing Abhay to explode with rage. Another actor who gets shortchanged by the
writing is the wonderful Jaideep Ahlawat as a policeman investigating a string
of crimes, all of them with links to Niya.
There are several points where it seems like Aatma may head in an interesting
direction, but then the writer holds back. There’s a neatly executed scene in
which Ahlawat’s policeman has a dream which seems to suggest that he’s getting
far more involved in the case than he should be. Where did that come from? What
happens thereafter? No answers. Elsewhere, Maya is told that the only way Abhay
will manage to take Niya away from her is if a wedge is driven between her and
the child. Why is that not carried forward? Again, no answers.
Where you can’t fault Aatma
is in the departments of cinematography and production design which lend an unrelentingly
eerie atmosphere to the film even when the story goes downhill. Sophie Winqvist’s camera seems to
stand beside the ghost at some points observing his prey, and sometimes next to
us observing them all. Sometimes it goes to floor level watching a woman walk
to her death, sometimes it peers down from the balcony of a high-rise building,
sometimes it watches the backs of the characters through most of a scene, sometimes
it is far, sometimes it is close, and always always it’s lovely. Production designer
Sukant Panigrahy complements Winqvist’s work with colours and disturbing settings
that seem born to host a ghost.
The
effect is particularly striking in Aatma’s
two most frightening and most well-conceived scenes: one involving that
aforementioned bathroom and schoolteacher, the other featuring a Hindu priest. There
are other scarey moments in the film, but since they’re mostly concentrated in
the first half, the impact peters out post-interval.
In the end, Aatma
simply leaves you with a sense of what might have been. It might have been that
much-needed Bollywood film about spousal abuse and the challenges an assertive
woman faces in today’s world; it might have been the story of what loneliness
and loss can do to a little child; it might have been about the pain that
divorce visits on a child and the politics an evil parent can play; it might
have taken us into the mind of a violent husband. The ghost could have been a
metaphor here for the horrors in an ailing marriage. The supernatural angle
could have been just a clever device to tell a larger story about relationships, the way Reema
Kagti’s recent Talaash used the genre to
show us a marriage torn apart by the trauma of the death of a child while
simultaneously discussing society’s indifference to those who live on its
margins.
Could have been… Might have been… Is not… Despite a good
start and some truly alluring individual elements, Aatma disappoints.
Rating
(out of five): **1/2
CBFC Rating (India): A
Running time: 95
minutes
