No Smoking

Articulating abstract thought. Do I do it well? Is it important that you understand a complex premise in its entirety or is it more important to feel it? Is it more important to draw a literal interpretation or more important to get a general feeling of what something was about.

I ponder these questions as I walk out of “No Smoking” waiting for the movie to sink in. Next to me is a guy saying, “Arre yeh kya, Hindi picture me dimag lagana padega ab?” Another lady sitting in the row in front saying, “Not even half a star ya”. I can’t but help feel a little bit superior to these people. I try to make sense of inside references. I rattle off Brazil , Kafka’s trial (the K reference), 1984, A clockwork orange, Dr Strangelove inside my head.

But then have I really understood it better than the people around me? Perhaps I lack the intellectual bandwidth to do so. But them cinema like this ever so often reminds me how passionate I am about filmmaking. How much I would like to make films someday.

This is a brilliant film. It’s going to take two or three viewings more for it to sink in. I know that a typical reaction would be; “What! Huh! I just paid 150 bucks to feel dumb”. But then the filmmaker’s already got all of it worked out inside his head doesn’t he? It’s up to us the viewers to decipher/interpret what’s going on and take away something from it.

K’s ordeal is similar to what Joseph K goes through in Kafka’s trial. Is this an inside reference by the way? Or am I reading too much into it? Normal turns into nightmare. K doesn’t understand what is happening to him. Or why it is happening. It’s amazing how the movie itself moves from simple to bizarre to mirror what’s going on inside K’s head. By the end we don’t know what is real and what is nightmare. Like Calvin & Hobbes I think this movie tries to deal with the issue of subjective reality. The only difference between Kafka’s K and Kashyap’s K is that Kashyap’s K finds redemption in the end. I guess that’s why he calls it a happy kind of film.

Also there’s a reason why all of this happens to K. To me K is an extremely self involved and narcissistic man who has to pay the price in the end. I don’t think it matters whether the Orwellian nightmare that he goes through is real or not. I think what matters here is that he finds redemption in the end.

I’m not sure I understand the film completely. For instance, I don’t understand the Annie/Anjali angle. I’m confident however, that a lot of it happens inside K’s head.

This film is visually very dense and it’s going to take multiple viewings to decipher. Like Brazil ’s Sam Lowry, K slips in and out of nightmare and fantasy. And I’m glad that the end is left suitably open ended (the cut off fingers). We don’t know what was real. It is for us to figure out. Or for us to interpret in our own way. Scratch beneath the surface and there are a lot of things to take away from this film. There’s no “Aha” moment in this film. It’s not like solving a puzzle and there’s no real answer however hard you think about it. I think it’s up to viewers to interpret the central theme of this movie for themselves. I know the film maker probably had his own interpretation but I’m glad he leaves it suitably open ended and ambiguous. This, very importantly, give people something to think about. And that’s what a good film does. It gives you something to think about. This will be for me one of those films that remains in your head far longer after you’ve seen it. It’ll keep coming back to me over time and making sense bit by bit.