Abhindi noir. Dibakar Banerjee’s take on the classic noir is deliciously desi. The mind that conceived Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! paints a lurid picture: “Normal middle-class people committing a horrible crime and taking the long, slow ride to hell while watching Indian Idol, a cooked human finger in bhindi ki sabzi, blackmailing a successful event management executive with risqué pictures of him with his kid’s ayah, a private divorce detective in love with a TV star who’s the reigning queen of mythologicals.” That sort of thing.

The ’40s and ’50s, the classic period of American film noir, which combined the gangster genre with the detective form, produced morally ambiguous protagonists who came to represent post–war America’s stylised vision of itself, a reflection of the anxieties and tensions of a country in uncertain transition. Not many Indian films of this period can be classified as true blue noir because until very recently we didn’t make pure genre cinema. As Shreeram Raghavan, director of Johnny Gaddar, notes, great suspense films like Jewel Thief and Teesri Manzil were also in a sense great musicals. “Bees Saal Baad and Kohraa were horror films but what people remember most is the music of these films. Kahin deep jale…the song can scare me even today!”

No doubt, mavericks like Guru Dutt, Raj Khosla, Vijay Anand, and others were exposed to trends in world cinema and inspired by noir. Anand’s 1954 Dev Anand-Kalpana Kartik starrer Taxi Driver showed a strong Hollywood noir influence. So did Guru Dutt’s Baazi and Aar Paar and Dev Anand’s Jaal which had anti-heroes, femme fatales and noir cinematography. But the superimposition of typically Indian elements of hyperbolic dialogues, song and dance and happy romantic endings ensured that Indian noir remained less dark and angsty than its Western counterparts.

Cultural differences are at play here. Perhaps we’re too happy for noir. Banerjee reasons, “Our families cocoon us, you’re never totally alone out here and crime is a social rather than personal choice. Our best black and white period was taken up by social drama. A few fog-ridden romantic ghost flicks and some crime capers like Howrah Bridge dipped their toes but never jumped into the oily black waters of sin and punishment. And by the time we were urban, lonely and desperate to get into the noir mood, colour cinema had arrived.”

Call it a sign of the times, but we seem to be closer to black now. The trickle of neo-noir which began in the 1990s— Raakh, Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar, Is Raat Ki Subah Nahin has picked up momentum in the 2000s with fare like Paanch, No Smoking, Johnny Gaddar, Being Cyrus, Ek Chalis Ki Last Local, Manorama Six Feet Under, Mithya and Maharathi. The themes of these films reflect the last 10 years of skewed economic growth and social inequalities in India. “The conflict between the greedy urban creamy layer and the seedy urban dispossessed are just what we need for alienation, personal crime, greed, ambition and slow erosion of moral support from immediate family. Bingo! We have the noir hero or heroine to come out to murder her own lover and blackmail her father,” says Banerjee. He may not be too off the mark. The gruesome Neeraj Grover murder case, which rocked the headlines last year, had all the elements of a noir.

Navdeep Singh, who directed the critically acclaimed Manorama Six Feet Under, attributes the recent interest in noir to a combination of a new wave of directors who have gown up as movie buffs and an audience that’s slowly becoming cynical about candyfloss. “People are prepared for stories about morally ambiguous characters. It’s not just heroes and villains anymore,” echoes Raghavan.

Westernised, urban middle-class confused-about-roots directors like Banerjee and Singh who have grown up on Hammett, Chase, Woolrich and Greene and are inspired by American noir films are getting money to make films. Multiplexes have enabled them to create films where strong characters rather than stars drive the plot. If made within tight budgets, production houses like UTV’s Spotboy and Handmade films are willing to take on such experiments.

Technology has helped. The circulation of DVDs has allowed for greater exposure to world cinema. “Style travels much faster than before. These filmmakers are cinephiles who are influenced by noir and crime films in general. In making their films, they pay homage to the legacy that influences their work. That’s what you see in all their films – craft, style, the love for cinema and a desire to move against the tide of that which has become habitual,” observes Ranjani Mazumdar, associate professor of cinema studies at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Noir is attractive because it’s one of the few genres where you can get away with a cynical and dark view. The style is also big on technical pizzazz—odd angles, contrast lighting, shadows. The 1946 classic Kohra inspired by Hitchcock’s Rebecca still haunts with its stark Chiaroscuro frames. As Mazumdar underlines, ultimately noir is a highly aestheticised form that draws its lighting from German expressionism. “You have to be a cinephile to craft a good noir film as it plays with the power of cinematic language.” When discussing the look of a scene Raghavan says he tells his director of photography, ‘let’s do this like film noir, which means we are trying for a certain graphic frame and lighting’.

Many see the new Indian noir movies as diluted, watered down versions that lack the authenticity, sex appeal and darkness of the classic film noir. Here’s one online rant this writer stumbled upon, ‘Where are the elements of film noir in Manorama and Johnny Gaddar? Where is that dark and deathly feeling of doom and despair? Where are those faces of evil characters so lighted up that they leave a permanent impress on your psyche and whenever you think of them, a chill runs through your spine? Where is K.N. Singh?’

Such an argument misses the point. Imperfect and amateurish as they often are, contemporary noir is being made in different times and is interesting for different reasons. Indian noir, like the curry Western, has never blindly followed the conventions developed by the Americans or the French. Today one senses a refreshing confidence, a greater facility with the genre. In Maqbool Vishal Bharadwaj transported Macbeth to the world of Indian organised crime as deftly as Othello was adapted to Omkara. Liberated from the artifice often seen in earlier Bollywood noir, Johnny Gaddar was uber original in execution. Banerjee praises Singh’s Manorama for its authenticity. “Manorama is really a different animal—a hope for us all. It actually dips into a real small town, with real, rooted characters that are not urbanised Westernised rip offs of the Californian Black Eye—and then takes us into the bleakness and hell that interior India can be.”

Crafted by avid world cinema buffs, the new desi noir films are marked by a self-reflexivity that makes them compelling postmodern works which revisit the classic genre in cutting edge-new ways. What’s striking about them is their Indian yet global texture, their layers of multiculturalism, their fascinating journeys of adaptation. In Manorama, Singh deftly incorporated a number of noir devices: the flawed hero in crisis, the double-crossing femme fatale, the nothing-is-what-it-seems aspect, the veiled social comment and the visual vibe. Inspired by Chinatown, he even has a scene with Abhay Deol watching the Roman Polanski classic. Likewise, Raghavan shot the beginning of Johnny Gaddar in black and white just to capture that mood and era and dedicated it to James Hadley Chase and Vijay Anand.

Anurag Kashyap’s unreleased Paanch was among the first pure noir films to come out of Bollywood. Watch out for his lavishly mounted, star-studded Bombay Velvet, an upcoming noir that revisits Bombay of the ’60s and charts its growth into a megapolis. Kashyap smiles enigmatically when I ask him whether a multi-crore noir isn’t a contradiction in itself. “Yes it’s a contradiction. A very exciting one.”

Exciting it is. Given Indian cinema’s famed penchant to draw from different traditions and make them its own, the future is sure to throw up some exciting new hybrids. After Hollywood experiments like the psycho noir (Fight Club, Se7en) and the future noir (Blade Runner, Minority Report), some of the most exciting neo noir in recent times has come from Asia. We'll wait and watch how the masala noir evolves. Banerjee’s bhindi noir might just mark a post-modern high point when it hits 70 mm. Hell, it might even inspire a Hollywood biggie or two.

One thing’s certain. ‘Lady’s Finger,’ that endearing old Indianism, will never be quite the same again.

KILLING ’EM SOFTLY

Think femme fatales and the most iconic image that comes to mind is of the stunning towel-clad Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) in Double Indemnity as she emerges at the top of a stairway landing, looking down from a position of great power. Curiously, the Indian femme fatale isn’t a popular cultural icon despite out own tradition of vishkanyas and apsaras. Vamps on screen including the magnificent Helen, who came closest the original femme fatale of classic noir with her peroxide blonde wigs and faux feathers, have often been, as a theatre veteran put it, ‘tinged with martyrdom and reduced to simpering simpaticos’. But as the traditional dichotomy between the woman as goddess and as destructive temptress crumbles, we are seeing richer and more nuanced depictions of the seductress. Verve frontlines five recent bad girls to come out of Bollywood:

Bipasha in Jism
As the embodiment of pure, unmitigated evil, here was an anti-heroine seldom seen in popular Indian cinema earlier.

Tejaswini in Paanch
As Shiuli, the grungy groupie who blatantly uses her sexuality to manipulate the rock band members of The Parasites.

Dimple in Being Cyrus
As Katy, the bumbling, comically dysfunctional Parsi who invokes laughter as well as empathy.

Tabu in Maqbool
As Nimmy, the ghagra-clad coquettish Lady Macbeth provokes murder but dies of guilt.

Raima in Manorama Six Feet Under
As Sheetal, the innocent-faced damsel in distress who misleads and betrays the crime-writer protagonist without a qualm.

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