Revisiting Khalid Mohamed’s Silsilay As It Clocks 20 Years News24 –

It would be the easiest thing to dismiss this enrapturing ensemble piece as just one attempt by a film critic to crossover to the other side. It would also be the most unjust and creatively destructive thing to be dismissive of Khalid Mohamed’s third feature film.

With Silsilay Khalid has truly blossomed as a raconteur of ravishing devices. Silsilay is an ambrosial outing into the hearts of several extremely mercurial and beautiful women, all trying to come to terms with the eccentric metabolic activities of the body that we often describe as love.

An episodic excursion to the heartland of the man-woman axis, Silsilay is an expertly assembled collage of contemporary and traditional values, all cemented by cinematic conventions such as songs (Himesh Reshammiya belting out what sounds like naughty homages to phillum music) and, yup, dances too.

But do not undermine the director’s strengths as a storyteller. In his earlier films Fiza and Tehzeeb, Khalid Mohamed erred in bringing his complex women-centric films to a comfortable culmination. In Silsilay, he goes all the way to the finale with a flourish and finesse.

More urbane than opaque, more metro-centric than massy, Silsilay is that above-ordinary experience which gives us characters who are real and yet cinematic. The gallery of women are, as usual, peculiar to Khalid’s sense of aesthetics. Every woman in Silsilay, from Tabu to Divya Dutta, is a fey and fabulous creation, more remarkable for what they don’t say rather than say.

The dialogues (Khalid Mohamed) are exceptionally expressive. When Rahul Bose meets actress Bhumika Chawla for the last time, she comments on how her dog still seems to love him.

“Thank you for one peg of whiskey and two pegs of sarcasm,” Bose retorts.

Sarcasm is just one of the moods that the narrative embraces. Moving through its triple-tiered cake about the ache of human relationships, Silsilay journeys with bridled ecstasy into the land of the lusciously love-lorn.

Story No. 1 has Bhoomika Chawla (totally transformed from dull to dynamic) as an actress on the brink. At the end, when she seems to end her life, her sister Divya Dutta says, “I’m crying because you are not.”

Desensitized femininity is a theme that runs through the film. “How long will you take this behaviour?” Tabu’s stepson goads her in the film’s final and by far the best story. Tabu, as the Muslim wife trying hard to overlook her husband K.K. Menon’s philandering ways, brings an extraordinary quality to the proceedings. In her characterization and performance, not to mention the extraordinary cinematography, this episode echoes Guru Dutt’s Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam and Satyajit Ray’s Charulata.

It’s easy to miss Khalid’s sensuous allusions (for example, Nargis in Mother India on the TV as Tabu sits forlorn waiting for her husband) and look at the film’s self-consciously avant-garde format as an affectation.

However, the three women and even peripheral characters such as Natassha as Riya Sen’s promiscuous roommate in the second episode, all add up to a mass of microcosmic magnificence, exuding strength and frailty in serio-tragic measures.

The middle story, where the small-town girl Riya Sen must choose between her dangerously undependable lover-boy (Ashmit Patel) and her quietly loving and compassionate boss (Jimmy Shergil), is weak in comparison with the other two stories, mainly because Riya Sen is miscast as the wide-eyed innocent (a la Konkona Sen in Page 3). The character called for Raima, not Riya Sen.

Also, the unnecessary necking, petting, and smooching in the middle story jars in a film that’s high on aesthetics. Santosh Sivan’s cinematography gives each of the three episodes a distinctive colour, mood, and flavour and yet brings them together in one cohesive clasp. The songs come on once too often. But the eloquent ghazals in the Tabu episode make up for the excesses.

To imagine this film without Tabu is to look at Agra without the Taj Mahal. In her 25-minute role, she brings 25 eternities of profound emotions. Expressing the outward calmness of a sea secreting turbulence, Tabu again proves herself the last of our classic actresses. The hint of eroticism between the lonely wife and her stepson is so controlled and restrained, not only by the director but also the actress, who’s like a pond awaiting a pebble to destroy the surface placidity.

Bhoomika Chawla, as the spunky actress who decides to have a child out of wedlock, is a revelation. She adds juice to this moist-and-delectable sensuous and silken soufflé of warm and live-in emotions.

The men don’t stand a chance. Still, Rahul Bose creates space for himself. But you wonder why Khalid is so partial to the women characters, often at the cost of portraying the men as conceited caricatures.

Shah Rukh Khan, as the narrator, brings in a gloriously gamboling quality to a film that takes itself far less seriously than its tormented characters.

In an interview with Subhash K. Jha, Khalid Mohamed was more amused than exasperated by the criticism about a journalist turning to filmmaking. “That’s so weird. In France, every other journalist makes films — if not features then documentaries. What’s wrong with that? It’s like saying Suraiya shouldn’t have acted because she sang. My first film Fiza was massacred. But now they say it’s nice. Hopefully, they’ll massacre Silsilay and say my previous film Tehzeeb was nice. Producer Vashu Bhagnani was just not interested in promoting Silsilay, maybe because he had bigger films to look into. I just feel grateful to Mr. Bhagnani for allowing me to make a film. These days, to get a producer for a film that isn’t cheesy or sleazy isn’t easy. At least Vashuji made it possible for me… We did have differences during the final editing. Fortunately, he isn’t a stubborn man and he relented finally. See, the film became too long… He made some truly brilliant suggestions for cuts, which I largely agreed to, and cut the film down to two hours and 15 minutes. Then before I knew it, I heard he was cutting down the film further behind my back in collaboration with my editor. That’s where I decided to do the tandav (dance of destruction). I thought of actually calling my film Adaa. But the title was registered for a Gulshan Grover-Diana Hayden flick. Then… since Mr. Chopra’s son Aditya made Mohabbatein, I thought why not Silsilay? Besides, it suits my theme to perfection. Silsilay is about a crisscross of relationships. It’s like Love Actually in terms of style and format. There are three main relationships, one of them concerns an actress from Telugu movies, played by Bhumika Chawla, who comes to Mumbai to become a star and has a live-in relationship with Rahul Bose… It’s about those times in relationships when we say no when we actually mean yes. For the music I first went to Anu Malik, who gave me stock songs. I moved on to Himesh Reshammiya, who gave me a choice of 40 tunes… Silsilay is the largest canvas that he has depicted so far. There are 15–16 characters in Silsilay. Even incidental characters are important. Shah Rukh Khan readily agreed to make a guest appearance. We’ve been friends for years. I’m very fond of him. And he immediately agreed. Tabu was to work with me in Tehzeeb. But she went underground after reading the script and then vanished. Maybe she didn’t like the script. I got Urmila Matondkar in Tehzeeb, who was supposed to do my Fiza at one point… Tabu is effortless in Silsilay. She takes our breath away. Her personality extends far beyond cinema… And Rahul Bose… when he read the script, he said there was nothing for him to do. We sat down together and worked on the nuances. He was thrilled because he gets to play his favourite sport, rugby… I’m very happy with the performances of Tabu, Rahul Bose, Bhumika Chawla, and Natassha from Ekta Kapoor’s serials in her first non-Balaji project. Silsilay isn’t a big film. But it’s a large-hearted film. It doesn’t have heaving bosoms. But it has a large heart… and, hey, there’re lots of slurpy kisses between Ashmit and Riya.”