Abbas-Mustan’s Humraaz Clocks 23 Years

How can we forget Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M For Murder about a husband who hires a charlatan to bump off his wife, when Andrew Davis recently remade the film as A Perfect Murder? Now Abbas-Mustan, the Indian purveyors of slick intelligent thrillers, give a revivified interpretation to the classic murder thriller.

Humraaz is a gripping Hitch-cock-tale. While the Hollywood films were only about greed and other sleazy motivations, Abbas-Mustan add a dash of traditional Indian values to the original when the wife, initially in collusion with her lover to betray her husband, begins to grow progressively conscious of her spousal duties. This is where the film begins to resemble Raghunath Jhalani’s 1978 marital drama Badalte Rishte where Reena Roy married Jeetendra for his riches but soon gave up loverboy Rishi Kapoor for the traditional comforts of marriage and the mangalstura.

In fact, Humraaz is more akin to Badalte Rishe than Dial M For Murder or Perfect Murder. When Amisha Patel, playing a member of a modern dance troupe, is complimented by the tycoon Bobby Deol for an effortless performance she laughs, “What’s a performance worth if it doesn’t look natural?”

What, indeed! Humraaz is like a well-choreographed tango where every character plays a role on more than one level. While the three dramatis personae Bobby, Akshaye Khanna and Amisha remain locked in a triangular tussle to the bitter end (for ‘batter’ or worse), they are pitched into a tunnel of enticing double-layered performances where they perform into the camera as actors and as characters “pretending” to be who and what they are not.

Abbas-Mustan are among the most underrated directors of commercial Hindi cinema. Though most of their trademark-taut thrillers are derived from Hollywood sources (Daraar was Sleeping With The Enemy and the starting point for Baazigar was A Kiss Before Dying), they take the germ of a foreign idea and embellish it with ‘spicy’-fications to an eminently palatable degree, much in the way that the comic sidekick in Humraaz, Johnny Lever, zaps people by constructing alarming visions of what could happen if the given situation got out of hand.

Outwardly a well-constructed thriller about a tycoon Raj Singhania (Deol) who discovers his wife has been cheating on him, at heart Humraaz is quite a morality tale about what pits of degradation and avarice people can fall into in today’s age of monstrous materialism. The basic characters of the acquisitive choreographer-dancer Karan (Akshaye Khanna) and his girlfriend Priya (Amisha Patel) can be sourced directly to Abbas-Mustan’s last film Ajnabee.

Remember Akshay Kumar and Bipasha Basu plotting to create havoc in tycoon Bobby Deol’s life? In Humraaz, Akshaye Khanna and Amisha are the slurper-troupers with a finger-licking craving to get rich quick.

Enter tycoon Bobby Deol who goes all moony every time Amisha passes by on a plush cruiser liner where titanic emotions unravel with a silken suppleness.

The best thing about Abbas-Mustan’s films, apart from their sustained suspense, is the economy of editing. The sequences in Humraaz are cut, by Abbas-Mustan’s sibling Hussain Burmanwala, with a surgeon’s precision. In the crucial climactic overture where a masked killer attacks wife Amisha Patel at home as husband Bobby seethes in his pained vindication at work, is so brilliantly cut that even old Hitchcock would’ve smiled in approval.

Like many suspense films in Hindi, Humraaz negates its own riveting rhythm of narration in pursuit of a conventional climax where Goodygoody Tycoon Bobby must beat the Scummy Gold-digger Akshaye to a pulp. The end-violence is much too bloody. Abbas-Mustan have a strange fascination for impaling their murder victims. Maybe they want to drive in the point in every way possible.

Also the directorial duo’s enduring fondness for Johnny Lever’s comedy gets in the way of the taut narration. One of the funnier scenes features villain Akshaye Khanna doing a dirty deal with Deol while watching the popular soap Kyukii Saas Bhi Bahu Thhi, thereby creating a curiously comic contrast between crime and domesticity.

The most seriously comic moment is provided not by Lever, but Dilip Joshi as a liftman who smiles indulgently watching tycoon Bobby Deol glued to his mobile, not knowing that the tycoon is listening to his wife’s screams as she’s being attacked by an intruder hired by the tycoon.

Bobby Deol as the tycoon tries to blend the suave eroticism of Robert Redford in Indecent Proposal with Ajay Devgan’s martyred husband’s role in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam. Amisha tries hard to infuse passion and emotion in her complex role. Somehow she can’t seem to fight her character’s battle beyond the warpaint.

Finally, the film is a triumph for Akshaye Khanna. As the first leading man to play an out-out-out villain, Khanna jumps into his unalloyed diabolism with a relish that transmits itself to the audience. The little-little things that he does with his face, for example in the wedding-party sequence where Bobby sings about love to his new wife, go a long way in making Humraaz a special thriller. As his character gets progressively scummy, Akshaye plays Karan as a symptom of today’s materialistic impulses.

The rest of the cast, including the talented Suhasini Mulay, is pushed into the shadows. Mulay, playing tycoon Bobby Deol’s grand-mother, doesn’t even get to speak in her own voice. An unconscious symbol of the subversion that’s crept into the joint family system?

Unlike other suspense thrillers, here the cinematographer Ravi Yadav doesn’t bathe the frames in darkness. The film wears a bright glossy look, especially in the portions shot on-board a luxury cruiser liner which incidentally was also the setting of Abbas-Mustan’s Ajnabee.

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