Khufiya aka Secret [dir. Vishal Bhardwaj]

The Khufiya (Secret) in the title of Vishal Bhardwaj's new film (produced with Netflix) covers both the professional and personal life of its protagonist. Krishna Mehra aka KM (Tabu) works in covert intelligence, a spy 'handler' executing missions for the country that will never be highlighted in newspapers nor discussed at dinner parties. Krishna regards herself a professional and personal failure. We first see her reacting to a major workplace disaster. On the domestic front she lives apart from her ex-husband and son, and is almost always absent from the latter's big moments: Early in the film she turns up late for his performance as Brutus in a Hindi stage production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (which in itself appears a nod to VB's penchant for adapting the bard). Even this teen knows that her job at the "Central Secretariat" is a front for something else, and resents her constant bluffs. Krishna has another secret. She is separated from her husband (Atul Kulkarni) because she is a closet lesbian.

This detail is not doled out in linear fashion. Khufiya begins with a birthday soiree in Bangladesh, where an attractive woman brings a gift for Brigadier Saqlain Mirza (Shataf Figar) of the Bangladesh military, believed to be in cahoots with Pakistani intelligence. The gift is actually a lethal weapon, but the woman has been betrayed, and she is the one killed (with a fork stabbed into her jugular, perhaps a nod to Julius Caesar's murder?). The woman is Heena Rahman aka Octopus, a protege of Krishna. We soon enter a flashback in which Rahman proactively approaches Krishna with an offer to spy for her. Rahman is played by sensational Bangladeshi actress Azmeri Haque Badhon, whose innate magnetism makes it easy to digest the chemistry she develops with Tabu's character and the emotional turmoil caused by her assassination. Long after her character is off the screen, you feel her impact.

Bound by orders from her superior (Ashish Vidyarthi, in a rare non-mugging part) and driven by personal angst, Krishna sets out to catch the mole responsible for Heena's death. The obvious suspect is staffer Ravi Mohan (Ali Fazal) who seems to enjoy a lifestyle exceeding his official income. Ravi is rather easily recorded copying office secrets (literally, on a photocopy machine. It seems a little too quaint, but the narrative is set in the pre-millennium years, when USB drives and even CD burners were not mainstream technology). To figure out who is pulling his strings and how the information is transmitted, they set up an elaborate surveillance network covering Ravi's home as well. Thus we are introduced to his wife Charu (Wamiqa Gabbi, of Godha and Jubilee fame) and mother Lalita (Navnindra Behl). Charu is a doting spouse and mother...who, when alone, rolls her own joints and shakes a sexy hip to hippie-era Bollywood ditties. Lalita spends time with an Osho-inspired spiritual guru Yaara-ji (Indian Ocean / Aisi Taisi Democracy's Rahul Ram). When KM's team sets out to apprehend Ravi, things go very wrong; she has to start all over to catch a traitor and avenge the death of her lover.

From a bare outline this must sound all bog standard for the spy genre. But, at least when it's not wavering, there is an emotional core that's more John le Carré than Robert Ludlum. From what I hear, the script (by VB and Rohan Narula) changed the lead of Amar Bhushan's source novel to a woman and a queer. It takes the narrative to a more interesting personal, even romantic space. KM's equation with Heena has her deeply hurting by the latter's death, more so since she cannot discuss it with anyone (the ex-husband seems quite understanding, but I guess there are some things hard to share with a spouse). When Ravi's wife, after having been abandoned by him in escape, reaches out to Krishna to track him and reunite with her son, Krishna understands the perspective of a mother deprived of her child's love (Of course, it helps that this ties in with her own agenda). Even Ali Fazal's traitor is given some dimension - Ravi is a loving family man, but when Charu catches up with him again, he has to worry about her true motives and the risk to his own survival.

So far so good, but Khufiya's script fumbles badly in the consistency department. Almost as if Bhardwaj is afraid of audiences not being gripped by a serious drama, he bungs in jokes and farcical elements that break the immersion. The aforementioned fork stabbing is more Grand Guignol than anything else. When Charu tracks down Ravi in hiding, it would have been interesting to see how her mission tangled with her emotional involvement with the family, but this is jettisoned in favor of cheap jokes like when her mother in law pooh-poohs Ravi's security concerns describing her as a godsend "free maid". A later scene where a target is lured in with the idea of giving him a doped mutton dish and the other members at the table keep giving excuses about why they are not consuming it views like a particularly bad scene from a Jeffrey Archer novel.

Still, I was carried enough by the good stuff (Farhad Ahmed Dehlvi's cinematography is classy cool) to sit through the not-inconsiderable 157 min runtime in one go without feeling too distressed, which is more than I could say about some of VB's other films in the past few years, or the ridiculously overrated Raazi from Meghana Gulzar. Your mileage may greatly vary.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn [dir. Tsai Ming-liang]

In Goodbye, Dragon Inn, two characters stand silent for a long spell in the cramped disused corridor of a movie-hall building, while outside the rain steadily pours. Finally, one says to the other, "They say this theater is haunted." Coming somewhere around the halfway mark, it is the first instance of an original spoken line in this 82-min film. This is not to say that the proceedings thus far had been silent, or even devoid of dialog. But all the words heard till then came off the movie screen as it played the film-within-a-film of King Hu's Dragon Inn. In Tsai Ming-liang's languorous post-millennium arthouse drama the flickering images from Hu's 1967 swordplay epic are like ghosts. Ironically, these visuals and the crackling diegetic sounds are also the most vital element in a film whose 'real' characters all act like specters or somnambulists.

The most significant specter is of course the theater building itself: a crumbling edifice with dripping un-carpeted corridors, winding staircases and toilets that need to be manually flushed, it is living in the past. You can almost smell the dankness and decay. Even the films screened are ghosts, re-runs from long ago. We are privy to the last show of the day, maybe the last show ever for the cinema.

This shadow of fatalism hangs over all the other characters. They have no names, no identities beyond what we immediately see. There's the handicapped ticket-lady (Shiang-chyi Chen) who also doubles as janitor. The film devotes swathes of footage to her clomping deliberately along the lengths of passages or climbing multiple flights of stairs. She has unrequited attraction for the projectionist: when after making her way up she doesn't see him in his room, she stares a while at the still smoldering cigarette on the table edge, as though taking in his essence from its vapors. One of the most film's memorable images is when she looks up from behind the screen at the warrior woman in Dragon Inn gracefully leaping, dodging and slicing her path. It is a stark contrast to our ticket-lady with her slow clop.

Then there's the Japanese guy (Kiyonobu Mitamura) who mouths the line I referred to in the opening of this piece. Sitting for a vintage Mandarin potboiler in this derelict movie-house he is a fish out of water. We see him shift from one place to another: once to move away from a pair of women noisily crunching snacks, once as though to check on an old man sitting so still he might be dead. His encounter with a predatory woman slowly cracking nuts between her teeth is both humorous and creepy. We later learn that his interest in the movie-hall is not purely cinematic: it is a cruising joint for gays (In one scene a row of men take an undue amount of time at the urinals as they  discreetly size each other up). His remark about the haunted theater is intended as a pick-up line, but in Goodbye, Dragon Inn's deadpan world, all passions run cold, all desires go unfulfilled.

Going into the film, I knew this might be a polarizing "love it or hate it" experience. I get what Tsai Ming-liang was going for, an existential ghost story where the ghosts are memories of times gone or the desires/aspirations that either fell by the wayside or remained unsatisfied. The film has parallels with some of Wong Kar-wai's work, particularly In the Mood for Love (ItMfL). I don't know if it is representative of Tasi Ming-liang's general style, but in contrast with the lushness of ItMfL's elegy, Goodbye, Dragon Inn has an austere, even anemic vibe. I have to say that at least on first watch, I wasn't wholly engrossed. Like the ticket-lady's steps the pace is plodding, and it may be telling that during the runtime I had a repeated urge to pause this and re-watch my copy of Dragon Inn instead.

That said, it may prove more evocative on repeat watches when the rhythm of the film is already in the head. Ming-liang's affection for the theme and the setting is certainly evident (Apparently the idea came about after the theater owner told him that the place was going to be shut down). To complement the footage from Dragon Inn, two of that film's stars have cameos here that kindle the nostalgia factor. Perhaps on another rainy day, I may make a trip to this rundown theater and sit for a repeat show.