Vinod Agencies...

... or How I Fashion a Blog-post From Some Disorganised Thoughts on Cinema
***

I watched Agent Vinod last night, and it wasn't an eye-opener. In fact, I struggled to keep my eyes open every now and then. Let's start at the beginning, in Afghanistan, in that Desert of Doom or Death or Some Other Such Dangerous D-Word where a skirmish between 75 terrorists (Were they terrorists? Taliban? ISI? Business-sponsored interests?) and two Indian RAW dudes - one of them being a slightly overweight Ravi Kishen (whom I totally love, by the way) who looks like he hasn't run 500m at a stretch in two decades. The two Indian dudes win, of course, bharat mata ki jai etc., and while they are at it, they rescue a scantily-clad damsel trapped in a sack (bharat mata ki jai!). The action sequences are slick enough, if not particularly spectacular, and Saif and Ravi Kishen exchange endearingly silly banter. I want to see more of that woman (in both senses of the phrase). I am hooked.

But then, over-long opening credits ensue, taking one through not just the key actors and technicians, but also the lawyer and chartered accountants. This got me thinking - when the lawyers decide to do the legal work for the movie, do they say, "Boss, we'll waive some part of the fee if you credit us." I mean, I can't think of why a lawyer must be credited for a movie. He doesn't contribute to it creatively, does he? I mean, are the credits about everyone who did anything for the movie? Are they a vote of thanks? Or should they only credit people who worked on the movie itself? The fellow who brings chai for everyone on the set - should he be credited? What about the caterers? Or the hotels at the various locations where the unit stayed? The travel agents? Kareena's dentist?

You see what happened there? When the credits began, I was thinking of spies in Afghanistan. By the end of it, I am engrossed in the health of Kareena's gums. Detailed opening credits, a hat-tip to an earlier era of filmmaking, no doubt, probably work best when there is no action before them. It's like putting lengthy acknowledgments after a gripping prologue in a novel.

And this was the issue with Agent Vinod. There is some pretty engaging stuff - a smart joke here, a fun sequence there, some boiling tension - only to be killed by inconsistently paced and plotted stuff.

For instance, there was that brilliant scene with the Empress of Blandings-esque pet camel that Prem Chopra mercy kills with a heavy heart and moist eyes. There was a silliness to this scene, yes, but it was pitched and timed perfectly that I couldn't stop laughing. Was I the only one who thought Prem Chopra as David Kazaan was himself a bit Lord of Emsworthy - slightly out of sync with the world around him (he gets conned by Vinod, Iram and one man he believes is his own - the Colonel), slightly old, slightly beyond his prime, slightly clueless.

The camel made another appearance, as the password to a nuclear bomb in the last scene. There, it was just downright silly. And, somehow, not funny. The greatest password to defuse a nuclear bomb in all cinematic history still remains "Dulhan ki bidayi ka waqt badalna hai" from the seminal 16 December. Not only did the bomb in that movie require a password, it required the password to be spoken in Gulshan Grover's voice. The bomb has been smuggled into a college fest (yes, a college fest - who would expect a terrorist attack in an engineering college!) as "musical equipment", and Gulshan Grover immediately does what every terrorist does before launching a nuclear attack. He plays the drums. Fakely. With an expression conveying heightened calm and fulfillment. Like he's just slept with three supermodels at the same time. (If you don't believe me, watch the movie here.)

And how do they get him to say the password? They have a phone conversation with him where they "trick" him into saying the relevant words out of context. So ingenious. So yummy. 

You know the other great thing about 16 December? The "agents" are not coolly RAW or Intelligenec Bureau or any such thing. They are from the vastly underrated and underrepresented Revenue Intelligence. (If you're sniggering away, let me remind you that it was the very same Revenue Intelligence that exposed the Nira Radia scam.) But then, I'm not sure the Revenue Intelligence are even one-hundredth as cool as this movie makes them out to be. I don't think they have posh snipers, state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, an army of hackers, Milind Soman and an informer as hot as Aditi Govitrikar. For that matter, I don't think RAW has a single fellow like Agent Vinod either. As far as I know, these agencies have your standard-issue, slightly pot-bellied, middle-aged, mustachioed Government employees who do their job and come back home at 5 pm and lounge around their verandah in a torn banian and faded veshti and complain about corruption and rogue politicians. None of the hanging-from-a-cable-car-in-their-childhood nonsense.

I met a detective once, at a wedding, and I was aghast. He wasn't one of those, as Lauren Bacall so eloquently put it in The Big Sleep "greasy little men snooping around hotel corridors". Nor was he fast-talking, super-smooth, gun-toting Sam Spade variety. Not even the highly analytical, verbose Byomkesh Bakshi types. He was a Brahmin mama who lived in Mylapore, and when I spoke to him, was scooping paal payasam off his banana leaf and slurping it off his palm greedily. 

But this is a thing about making films about spies or detectives (or even lawyers for that matter). You have two options. You can either stick within existing tropes, and re-imagine or reinvent existing cliches - they are lies anyway, so you make a slightly different lie. Or you can go research the truth, and show them as they are. (No, while making films about lawyers, don't try being realistic. Some incoherent murmuring, an adjournment, and the bench clerk calling out the next case does not make for watchable cinema.) Sriram Raghavan was, clearly, doing the former. But he didn't go the whole hog - he seemed too constrained by prior art. Barring stray sequences, like that unbelievable sequence in that sleazy hotel in East Europe - that heart-stopping four-minute tracking shot gun-battle weaving in and out of corridors and rooms, with a dreamy song playing in the background, the blind pianist, those silent guns and their muted noise - he was stuck, not knowing which way to go.

There is another kind of spy movie. Vinod, a quiet family man, runs a gas agency, called "Vinod Agencies". But that is only a front. When he is not answering innumerable inquiries from various angry customers on when their gas cylinder will arrive, he is a super-agent. But he finishes all his work so subtly and clinically that he's home at 6 pm each evening to play cricket with his children. Something like a Bob Biswas working for the good guys. Now that's a compelling spy movie.