Andhadhun - Sriram Raghavan
This film follows Akash, Ayushmann Khurrana (Vicky Donor & Article 15), a blind pianist through his daily life. He becomes entangled in a murder and gets more than he bargained for in the scam he has been running for years.
Huge Story Issues
There are two main ways you can view the plot of this film. One is the overall plot of Akash’s blindness, or lack thereof. The second is of the murder. Neither work.
If the blindness is the main plot we miss the first five steps of the heroes journey as they all occur before the film starts. The main issue with this is that we fail to gain an understanding as to Akash’s motives behind pretending to be blind. We are given some indication of the benefits – cheap rent and people helping him – but these are merely benefits. We need to see the reason why. Because we don’t know why we don’t know why we should care.
If the story is about the murder then the Catalyst and Crisis of the film occur in the same scene – the cleaning up of the murder. All the scenes up until this point don’t inform the murder at all and are merely character building for Akash. Either way the plot doesn’t work.
There are points where we have to care about Akash and his situation. For example, he is tricked into a situation where he is going to have his liver harvested and left to die. He then sets up the same fate for Simi, Tabu (Haider & Drishyam). The situation is horrible for both simply because organ harvesting is terrible. The fact that we are supposed to support Akash’s decision to put Simi in this position is untenable when we don’t know why he is doing what he is doing overall – I mean we get that he is trying to get out of the situation he is in now but we have to care about the overall motives to support this decision and we just don’t.
The Reveals Are Well Handled
We learn that he isn’t blind early on after he wants to see the girl. He also drops his glasses and picks them up with ease – the neighbour’s kid sees this. These reveals are well handled and well shot.
Songs Are Part Of The Story & Then They Aren't
A huge problem that I often have with Bollywood films is that they are bloated and long because of songs that are just included because they are Bollywood films. The songs often have nothing to do with the story and have no tie in to the world we are in. It is inexcusable to break suspension of disbelief in this way for no reason – not to further story etc.
Andhadhun is very different in this regard. The songs are woven into the story and are important to the plot. The weaving in is well done, through the characters looking at YouTube and Akash’s job as a pianist.
Then, I guess because we hadn’t reached our quota yet, there is a song in the hospital which doesn’t do either of these things – it is jarring and off-putting.
Blindness Leads To Seeing Some Great Things
One of the best scenes in this film is where Akash has been hired as a surprise to give a personal concert to a murder victims wife. Akash arrives at the scene shortly after the murder and while he plays they clean up the scene of the crime – even wheeling the body past him. He then goes to the bathroom and sees the murderer hiding out in there.
Akash is then faced with the choice of doing nothing – because they think he couldn’t see anything or going to the police and giving up his charade. This would be much more powerful if we knew the reason why he was pretending to be blind in the first place. There is an interesting plot development here in that the head of the police station he goes to report the crime to is the murderer himself.
They do eventually cotton on that he isn’t blind and Sami comes after him and blinds him for real. This is brutal. Then in the final scene, many years later, it is revealed that he can see again even though he is still doing the same blind routine. In story terms this is the worst thing they could have done. It means that the hero hasn’t gained anything from his journey and returned to the same starting point – he is doomed to repeat the journey again. They also do not explain how his sight was regained.
The Defence Of Akash
As a hero Akash is not great because of all the things covered already. There are some things that are discussed about his motives. Of particular interest is the idea that is put forward that blind people play better music because their other senses and more focused without sight.
This holds water until we realise that the blindness is just a ruse. How can pretending to be blind have the same effect?
He does get his comeuppance when he blinded for real by Simi but this hardly seems justifiable in story terms to balance his fake blindness.
Lost In Translation
This film doesn’t translate to a foreign audience very well. There is too much detail that is unknowable and irrelevant. For example there is a big deal made of Akash getting a room because he is blind for only 500 Rupees. I’m guessing the point is that this is very cheap but how cheap, who knows?
There are also a lot of irrelevant titles of locations – perhaps this was relevant for the story but I certainly wasn’t pulling out a map to see where they were.
There were also 2.15 minutes of titles at the start of the film. The bit that was especially irksome was the Special Thanks To section and the list of all the movies ViaCom had made – all before the movie starts.
