Talvar: Brilliant film you may differ with

Cast: Irrfan Khan, Konkona Sen Sharma, Neeraj Kabi, Sohum Sharma

Rated: 8.5/10

Depending on which side you are seeing it from, you may differ or agree with Vishal Bhardwaj’s version of who killed Aarushi Talwar. But from whichever angle you see the film, the unanimous view will be that it is a cutting edge whodunit in which very few or no cinematic props, otherwise called dramatisation, have been used to delve into one of India’s most talked about perfect murders. It is taut, stark and to the point with Irrfan breathing life into a case of death most foul.

As a CBI officer who was removed from the case unceremoniously and sought voluntary retirement in sheer disgust he is just brilliant. Konkona Sen as Nupur Talwar, Aarushi’s stone-faced mother, shows too much emotion on screen departing from the popular image of the lady now in jail. Neeraj Kabi is utterly convincing as Rajesh Talwar.

Though Bhardwaj stitches together all the theories around the murder at length, the film, you can say without doubt, is the second biggest campaign to save the Talwars, after Avirook Sen raised startling questions of probe inefficacies in his detailed book Aarushi. Bhardwaj more or less says the compounder and the driver were the culprits as the entire story is sketched from CBI sleuth Irrfan’s eyes.

Aarushi would have turned 22 last March had she not been mercilessly killed in the safety of her home when she was just 14. Bhardwaj justifiably goes soft on questions around her vaginal swabs etc, clearly queasy about any kind of posthumous character assassination of the teenager. So, there are many questions that are unanswered. For eg, not even once is the post-mortem analyst ever shown or questioned in the film. He apparently changed his stance four times; CBI establishes that Hemraj’s body was not dragged from Aarushi’s room to the terrace but from the terrace to downstairs. But this assertion is left hanging in the air because Hemraj was found dead and decomposed on the terrace so was never dragged down.

Beside these nitty-gritty loopholes, the film more importantly is about the stark botch-ups by the UP Police and the CBI. The UP Police has cops who are not only utterly salacious and insensitive but also duds in their basic job of doing the routine things in a murder investigation — like calling in the forensics. But it is the unthreading of the system within the CBI that takes your goat. You see a CBI where one-upmanship, regime change and ego clash completely killed the case which Bhardwaj suggests had all but been solved after the compounder chirped in the narco test and the hand help, the sole witness, agreed to became approver after blood-stained clothes of Hemraj were discovered from the compounder’s closet.

That something so horrifying as a colleague letting down his partner, and probably tweaking the forensic findings of the bloodied clothing all the way at the lab in Ahmedabad can actually happen in the CBI, is shocking. Bhardwaj says it happened. And if that has happened, it is only correct that someone, somewhere raised questions about the role of the Talwars and save them from the grossest injustice of all times to come, if that is, they have indeed not killed their own daughter.

A must film for all kinds of reasons. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, October 4, 2015