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7 KHOON MAAF- More of an exercise in style than true substance

Aditya.Kripalani Aditya Kripalani | Exclusive |

Till a few years ago, no one would’ve ever thought of making a film on a woman who marries, remarries, weds again, ties the knot yet again… in fact, she walks down the aisle multiple times. That’s not all, the woman kills each of her husbands subsequently.

The theme might come as a jolt to the traditional moviegoers, since the wives on the Hindi screen are either depicted as docile and dutiful or fiercely independent and ambitious. The question is, will the orthodox Indian audience absorb a theme like this? It’s blasphemous, some may opine. Imagine a murderous bride, some may rant.

For a premise like this in which one woman has seven marriages which are so bad that she murders each of them, we need to be totally head over heels in love with the protagonist: Suzanna.

In 7 Khoon Maaf, Vishal Bhardwaj’s is an auteur in the best way: his stamp of smart dialogues, wonderful music, and reinventing current actors are all quintessential elements here, but something is missing. The space or reasons to fall in love with his protagonist are just not given to us as an audience.

For us to empathize with a woman who kills seven husbands one after the other at the most core level, we need to see her grow and try harder and harder to make each marriage last. We also need a bloody strong reason for why she still ends up getting married in the first place despite previous marriages failing.

But, Suzanna’s character just never grows.

She makes the first mistake with the army man and then she just goes on making the same mistake again and again with each lover.

She gets married to a guy who she thinks is spotless and white; and then she realizes that they are bad men and she kills them.

Why can’t Suzanna adapt, learn, grow and then each man maybe could have posed a more complex threat or situation and even though she has grown and changed, we still see her ending up being cheated. But this character just doesn’t grow at all.

And this exact same plot repeats itself seven times so much so that when the intervals comes with title- “4 more to Go” there was a collective ‘oh god’ in the theatre.

Susanna [Priyanka Chopra] is sheer unlucky in love. Her first husband, Major Edwin [Neil Nitin Mukesh], is overtly possessive and suspicious. After his demise, Susanna marries Jimmy [John Abraham] as she is floored by his musical talent. Jimmy becomes successful, but with success comes girls and drugs. He dies of drug overdose.

Enter Wasiullah aka Musafir [Irrfan Khan]. Impressed by his poetry, Susanna marries him, but discovers that he’s a romantic in daytime, but a beast at night. He too gets eliminated.

Susanna falls for the suave Nicolai [Aleksandr Dyachenko] from Moscow, but this marriage doesn’t last long as Susanna discovers that Vronsky has a wife in Russia.

Following the death of a foreign national, the police start taking keen interest in the case. The officer Keemat Lal [Annu Kapoor] enters Susanna’s life. Initially, he asks for sexual favors and later, persuades her to marry him. He dies due to cardiac arrest.

After the death of Keemat Lal, Susanna marries Dr. Modhusudon [Naseeruddin Shah]. Susanne is depressed and he puts her on a mushroom only diet. But he’s the first guy in her life who wants to get rid of her. Instead, she murders him.

In the end, Susanna marries yet again… for the seventh time. This time, to someone who knows she has committed the murders and sins.

Interestingly, she doesn’t take any time to get to know the men, she doesn’t say ok let’s not get married, let’s date….nothing. She meets. She marries. She kills. Seven repetitive times!!

Any satisfaction that comes out of characters comes out of character growth, out of them facing insurmountable odds, adapting, growing, failing, falling but then standing up and fighting again and then finally succeeding. Suzanna does none of this.

The men also are such flat characters. They may have a certain way of talking, a particular body language but none of them have any real dimension other than going from white to black.
How about some grays? How about having something different to offer as a husband? Each one comes in on a wave of happiness and then shows his true colors which time and again are black, not grey. Maybe one out of seven actually loves her but she murders him by mistake…..something different…. But no. each one at the core is a mirror image of the previous one.

With all the talented actors in the film, the script lets them down as we grow somewhat bored and wait for the next murder to happen. The ambience and mood, however, work very well which make the film more of an exercise in style than true substance.

Susanna’s ominous ringing of a church bell in her Xanadu-like home and her Greek chorus of faithful servants are brilliant touches in this Gothic film. Bhardwaj’s penchant for the tense Tarantino style exchanges is abundant in the film, when Susanna confronts each of her husbands.
If the script fails in defining Susanna’s husbands by simply showing a fatal flaw, their morbid death scenes, which veer between the darkly comic and the chilling, are fabulous in reinforcing the audience’s ambivalence towards Susanna.

It’s not to say that there is no joy in watching Saat Khoon Maaf. Not at all. There are several.

Priyanka Chopra, for one, showing tremendous courage. The cinematography by Ranjan Palit succeeds in creating an atmosphere of lurking menace. The art direction, which almost threatens to overwhelm the film. The music, which is so perfectly matched to the movie.

And yes, even Ruskin Bond, the writer, in a special role, saying the line that sums up the movie: It all comes down to love, sweetheart.

Indeed it does. Pity then that the film is a series of one night stands. What we wanted from the operatic Bhardwaj was an affair to remember.

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