Desi Drishyam: my quick take on Netflix’s “Hassen Dilruba”
Jeethu Joseph had come up with a cult classic in Malayalam and followed it up with an equally intriguing sequel recently. Great Mohanlal who was in the main lead (George Kutty) raised the overall quality of these movies few notches up. The main takeaway for me after watching these two movies was “Never believe what you see”, and Jeethu Joseph cleverly hoodwinked the audience with out-of-box twists in the tale.
But why I am discussing this classic movie as against writing my take on “Haseen Dilruba”?
The reason is simple, in my view, this movie is greatly “influenced “by Drishyam. No, it is not a rip-off of the Malayalam movie but the very essence of hoodwinking the audience with something absurd is cleverly used in this Dilruba. But was the director Vinil Mathew successful in delivering a Drishyam like impact? The answer is sadly Big NO. It is mainly because of a half-baked murder plot and very elementary police investigation.
The movie is revolving around an odd couple where a city girl Tapsee Pannu gets married to a small town by Vikrant Massey. There are fissures in their marriage on account of hyper expectations from each other and then enters a ‘woh’ character and the romantic plot gets converted into a “Pati Patni Aur Woh” rather than “Patni Woh and Pati” track. Then a murder takes place wherein the Pati is barbequed in an LPG blast. Fingers are pointed towards Patni as she is accused of murder but the lame-duck police are unable to pin the murder charges on Patni.
Apart from the shoddy screenplay, the picturesque location of the town where the movie was shot is breathtaking, Camera work is excellent, Performance wise Vikrant Massey in Pati’s role is too good, Tapsee has the Patni is Ok, Aditya Srivastav as the Police Inspector (he does a better job in CID with Daya & Inspector Pradyumna) is wasted, Handsome hunk Harshvardhan Rane is the ‘Who’ and he impresses you in his short role.
In Drishyam, George Kutty runs Video/cable Tv services, hence just watching thrillers and murder mysteries he gets all the ideas for this ‘perfect crime’. Here the Patni is shown as a reader of crime novels by some pandit, and all her moves are modeled on some plots found in these pulp fiction novels which are usually found on Railway or bus stands in India. (In fact, the movie poster is also designed like the poster-colored cover page of such sleazy novels)
Overall movie is good in patches; however, such ‘good’ moments are very few. And this desi Drishyam becomes very predictable as the story progresses.
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