Sujoy Ghosh has an unshakable affinity for slow-burn, edge-of-the-seat crime thrillers. Eleven years after Kahaani and four years after Badla comes Jaane Jaan, a moody noir that’s just as brilliant.
Based on the 2005 blockbuster Japanese novel The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino, Jaane Jaan is set in Kalimpong, a misty, mysterious hill station in West Bengal. It wastes no time in setting the stage. Ghosh doesn’t introduce us to his key characters Maya D’Souza (Kareena Kapoor Khan), a single mother who works at a local café, and her next-door neighbor, Naren Vyas (Jaideep Ahlawat), a socially awkward, genius mathematician who teaches at a neighborhood school. Instead, Ghosh simply lets us into their lives as they are going about it. Soon enough, someone gets killed, inextricably intertwining Maya and Naren’s destinies.
Enter Karan Anand (Vijay Varma), the investigating officer from Mumbai Police. He is everything Naren is not—handsome, smooth, nimble, amiable, an instantly likeable extrovert with sensual agility about him. However, as different as Karan and Naren might be, they share a few solid commonalities—they are exceptional at what they do, have a deep love for martial arts and a shared history. They went to college together and were chummy enough to know each other the way only people who have spent considerable time together do.
Jaane Jaan, which premieres on Netflix today, Kapoor Khan’s 43rd birthday, is the best gift she could have asked for at this stage in her career. After having played the star for over 20 years, she seems bored and eager to shift gears. In the last seven years, she has continued to work opposite giants in big-budget films such as Good Newwz (2019) and Laal Singh Chaddha (2022), but she’s also tried to branch out with smaller, more experimental films such as Udta Punjab (2016), Angrezi Medium (2020), and now Jaane Jaan, readily working with actors she never would have a decade ago.
It looks like her husband Saif Ali Khan’s career revamp through the bumper success of the Netflix show Sacred Games has left a major impact on Kapoor Khan. I couldn’t be happier about it. She is a delight to watch in Jaane Jaan, masterfully walking the tightrope held on either side by actors as formidable as Ahlawat and Varma. Kapoor Khan brings in the right amount of charm, pathos, aching vulnerability, and dignified femininity to a role as layered as Maya in a film otherwise largely dominated by men.
As Karan, Vijay Varma is the sexiest he’s ever been on camera, and for once, he’s not playing the bad guy. His scenes with Kapoor Khan are so charged with sexual tension, it’s delicious. However, it is when he and Ahlawat are together that the film soars the highest, the text just leaps off the screenplay and takes on a life of its own. Such is the magic of these two master craftsmen, so tantalizing is their battle of wits.
But despite superb performances by each actor, Jaane Jaan’s pièce de résistance is Jaideep Ahlawat. He is pitch-perfect as Teacher, this depressed, lonesome, self-conscious math whizz who everyone respects but no one cares about enough to even know his name and who is secretly so smitten by his neighbour that it transcends into devotion. Ahlawat is so feverishly good as the balding, hulking, dojo-practicing math genius, that you cannot help but lament his abject underutilization in Hindi films.
Along with direction, Sujoy Ghosh has also written the film’s screenplay and co-written the dialogues with Raj Vasant. But Jaane Jaan isn’t a whodunnit. The crime isn’t the story here. The trying to get away with it is. It’s a clever ploy for it turns the classic tropes of a standard whodunnit on its head and, therefore, keeps the audience on their toes, bringing them a reimagining fresh and sinister.
I particularly loved Ghosh’s astute attention to detail and the little flourishes. For instance, Maya looks weather-beaten, like someone living in the mountains for over a decade should. Or that her daughter actually bears a striking resemblance to her. Or the teacher’s equation with one of his students and how their whole coin trick comes full circle. Or the way Ghosh intricately embeds the teacher’s obsession with mathematics, placing it at the forefront in all that he thinks and everything he does, making it his vocation, and way of life. Or the film’s use of old Bollywood songs, particularly Aa Jaan-e-Jaan from the 1969 film Intaqam. It is so seductive, it haunts.
Avik Mukhopadhyay’s cinematography deserves a special mention too. The atmospherics set the film’s eerie tone and mood, capturing the mystique of Kalimpong in all its shrouded, spectral glory, transforming it into the ideal setting for a crime. The fog works as a clever, effective device. It conceals more than it reveals, much like Maya and Teacher. Moreover, Kalimpong is so crucial to the film, it is as important a character as the central trio, the way Kolkata was in Kahaani.
Urvashi Saxena has also done a fabulous job with Jaane Jaan’s edit. Filmmakers usually have a tendency to get indulgent and go overboard with backstories. Not here though. At 140 minutes, Jaane Jaan is sharp, sleek, and crisp, giving only glimpses, leaving crumbs so you can trace the trail. It effectively intercuts the journeys of each of the three very distinct, disparate characters as if they were all part of a jigsaw puzzle that it invites you to solve with them, one piece at a time.
If you look a little deeper, Jaane Jaan is a heartbreaking allegory, a poignant critique of our idea of beauty and beast, a peek into the heads of those who are respected because they can’t be loved, and the drastic lengths they go to be accepted, included, wanted.
First Published: Sept 21, 2023 4:00 PM IST
