A couple sits on a rock near the banks of a gushing river and discusses a future together. Their lines sound unrealistic in the way Hindi film dialogue often does, because this is a scene from a movie they’re shooting. A hand appears from the water and brushes against the woman’s sole. She kicks it away, caught in the eroticism of the moment. The director calls for a retake. The same thing happens again. Momentary confusion paves the way for a breathtaking reveal: a body emerges from the water in slow-motion, breaking, in truly cinematic fashion, the brief lull a plot that had seemed to hit a dead end left in its wake.
In Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s “Khamosh,” murder is everywhere. It is discussed, it is suggested, and it is seen. A motley film crew is filming a romantic thriller (ironically titled “Aakhri Khoon”) in Pahalgam, Kashmir, and at the heart of it is a murder. The director understands its significance in the film—he wants its execution to be flawless. But his crew is indifferent to his enthusiasm. His actors, like most seasoned film stars, are weary but professional, not particularly fussed about this director and his grand plans to stage the perfect murder.
This introduction doesn’t divulge what simmers just beneath the surface. Jealousies abound. Bitter glances and murderous stares are shot over dinner. Men are seduced and women objectified. From sleazy producers to conniving mothers, the set-up is reminiscent of a great Agatha Christie novel. (There is no doubt Christie might have been one of Chopra’s many influences.) After a budding actress slaps the inebriated producer at a party, her body is found hanging from a tree the next day, exactly how it was supposed to have played out in the movie they were filming. The police declare it an open-and-shut case of suicide, citing that she was upset to lose out on the lead role in an upcoming production. But, as it happens so often in the movies, this isn’t the entire truth.
What’s puzzling is that she was rehearsing her lines the night before in the hotel’s boathouse, an isolated cabin on the hotel’s grounds doubling up as a costume cabinet. The scene she was rehearsing is the one in which her character gets murdered, an ominous coincidence. She was screaming out her lines, much to the chagrin and amusement of the crew, when suddenly her voice lost its histrionic quality. Fear was palpable. Her terrified screams for help echoed in the dead of night. But nobody batted an eye. Everyone heard her rehearse, but nobody heard her getting killed.
Released in just one cinema, the Regal, in Bombay in 1985, a year after Chopra’s remarkable debut feature, “Sazaye Maut,” “Khamosh” is a fascinating specimen of Hindi independent cinema. Working off what might have been a stringent budget, Chopra uses ingenious filmmaking to elevate a stock murder mystery. The misty, stark, achingly beautiful landscapes of Pahalgam accommodate not lasting love affairs but cold-blooded murders. Quite incongruous, one might think, keeping in mind how the Hindi film industry has long used Kashmir as a place where lovers requite their love for each other, often through lavishly filmed songs. In “Khamosh,” the place attains a shroud of eeriness. Even Binod Pradhan’s camera is voyeuristic—it creeps up on people, eavesdrops, intrudes. We, the audience, are complicit.
A cursory glance at Hindi cinema’s most popular murders tells us how dramatic we like them to be. Vijay Anand’s “Teesri Manzil” opened with the image of a body zipping through the night air and landing on a slab of pavement. Later, in the same movie, a more sensational killing, extracting a well-earned gasp from those watching it for the first time. In Yash Chopra’s “Ittefaq,” a fugitive seeking refuge in a woman’s house on a rainy night stumbles upon a dead body in her bathtub. And that startling twist in Abbas-Mustan’s pulpy “Baazigar” deservedly made a star out of an actor. What these subversive murders have in common is that they were executed in cold blood by someone we expected to possess a little more humanity. And if only the film was seen by a larger audience, the cleverly staged murders in “Khamosh” would have found their rightful place alongside them. If only.
By choosing to not let the film deviate from the blueprint of an old-fashioned whodunit, Chopra makes the crucial (and brave) creative choice of giving us ample time to engage with the clues. And what clues these are: a deceptive photograph, a hidden movie prop, an inscribed khukuri, a missing button, and a body hanging from a tree. To the lover of mystery fiction, this would seem like a fine world to get lost in, especially when nothing ends up being what it first appears to be. We see each of these clues in close-up before Chopra cuts away. When they are referred to later after the plot has unravelled a little more, they acquire a special significance. Shorn of the flamboyance seen in Chopra's later work, “Khamosh” is a tightly controlled, thrilling exercise in suspense.
In this teasing mix (which includes passing tributes to “The Godfather” and “Psycho”) is a parallel thread casting light on how the Hindi film industry exploits hopefuls. At one point, a chilling rape scene is woven casually into the film they’re shooting. “This’ll make your career,” the director tells a budding young actress. When the scene crosses into lewdness, she breaks down. Chopra’s camera pans across the film crew’s stony faces. This pan is slipped in at the end as well, when the mystery is tied up, the villain is dead, and the crew discovers who it was all along. Only this time we see their faces through a red filter, as if indicating their complicity in letting these brutes roam free.
For years I instructed whosoever I recommended the film to to get into the habit of watching charming Hindi-language comedies from the 1970s if they ever hoped to grasp the achievement that is “Khamosh.” And for years I got puzzled looks in reply. Truly, what makes the film’s climax Hindi cinema’s finest example of metacinema is how it shrewdly plays on one of Hindi cinema’s most loved stereotypes. Oddly enough, “Khamosh” ends up being just like its murders: cold, smart, flawless.
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