New Delhi:
Secret agents have been a staple of Bollywood action movies for a few years now. A few of them, played by Mumbai’s biggest stars, now form a full-fledged espionage universe rustled up by the industry’s leading production house. They are unlikely to disappear from the Hindi showbiz radar anytime soon. Should we be interested in a small, low-key cinematic clone built around a bunch of spies who aren’t patches of the big boys in the game? The answer is yes. Written and directed by Atul Sabharwal, Berlin is not an explosive spy drama.
Not an exciting case by any stretch of the imagination, but a kind of sobering cautionary tale, the film subverts the genre. If you warm to it, you might find enough here to invest.
Sabharwal’s script deconstructs the building blocks and uses restrained tricks and colors to create a spy thriller far removed from the universe inhabited by the likes of Tiger and Pathaan.
Berlin has limited star power. Without vocals, it also does well with minimal background music. And the men involved in the plot are either very ordinary with their backs to the wall or trained spies whose actions lack heroism.
The film streaming on Zee5 conjures up a world where the truth is unnecessary or at best prone to manipulation. Facts have been twisted to serve the interests of those who make up the stories, be they national, geopolitical or just self-serving.
Berlin revolves around a deaf man accused of spying for a foreign country, a sign language interpreter who was there to interrogate a suspect, a high-ranking intelligence official with several axes to grind, and various other agents spying on each other.
The two-hour film has a couple of high-speed chase scenes and the occasional moment of rough-and-ready action, but it’s clearly driven mostly by scenes of violence and sharp rhetoric. These are not crusaders fighting for a nation, but individuals working in the shadows, intent on protecting their turf, covering their tracks, and saving their hides, which they cannot do without significant collateral damage.
Because such a narrative would amount to sacrilege in these hyper-national times, Sabharwal sets his story in 1993, on the eve of a state visit by a post-Cold War Russian president carrying a cryogenic rocket. sleeves. The US is far from satisfied. The fear of the death attempt of a visiting dignitary looms large.
The clandestine efforts to keep the Indian guest safe are complemented by the blatant games that the two branches of the intelligence apparatus – the Bureau and the Wing – play against each other.
Berlin takes its name from the fictional Connaught Place cafe, frequented by government officials and secret agents and used to trade classified information. The men who wait tables here are all hearing impaired. Among them is Ashok Kumar (Ishwak Singh), the most observant of the lot.
A Bureau team led by Satpal Dhingra (Rahul Bose) arrests Ashok Kumar and charges him with treason. Pushkin Verma (Aparshakti Khurrana), who works as a teacher at a government school for deaf-mute children, is invited to conduct an interrogation. Before each session, Dhingra, whose motives are shrouded in mystery, gives Pushkin the questions to ask.
Two ordinary men are sucked into the world of espionage. Pushkin asks predetermined questions. Ashok uses sign language to answer. Silence, hand gestures and Pushkin’s interpretations for the benefit of Dhingra and his men give way to conversations and information captures that simply elude observers.
The two actors at its center are consistently in their elements. Ishwak Singh in particular is expressive and mystifying at the same time. Is Ashok Kumar an innocent victim or a man who really knows too much? Actor Singh emphasizes the enigma of the exercise – and the character.
Aparshakti Khurra, as an unsuspecting teacher who gets absorbed in a messy business that often comes close to endangering his life, conveys confusion and stubbornness throughout the mind games the character is subjected to.
Rahul Bose understands the qualities of the man he plays and runs with them without going overboard. An intelligence honcho – he reports to the Head of Office (Kabir Bedi in a cameo) – and his subordinates have skeletons in their closets. They go to any length, keep them there.
Berlin Spies is obviously different from the Hindi movie Lionesses. One of them, a wing chief (Deepak Qazir Kejriwal), tries to disprove Pushkin’s general belief that intelligence agents are knowledgeable and privy to government secrets.
“Hum bhi guess hi karte hain,” he says. “We also count two plus two and arrive at 3 and 5, rarely at 4.” Berlin scores points for its sincere and subversive portrayal of secret agents as flawed and vulnerable people rather than invincible men of steel. Satpal Dhingra and his ilk are weighed down by misgivings and doubts.
For some, Berlin may seem dumbed down to the point of absurdity. If so, they would have to be nudged to recognize the film’s audacity to swim in the tide of popular preference.
To be sure, Berlin is not free of a few creative misjudgments. Nothing is more evident than the details of its overcrowded period. Although much of the film is shot indoors, the outdoor scenes and interior of the cafe of the same name seem to evoke the 1970s (if not the 1960s) more than the early 1990s.
Berlin deserves credit for refusing to conform to the current demands of the Bollywood spy movie model.
