The dinner scene which is the climax of this film is simply juvenile and clumsy. Everyone says no to the mutton and it is quite obvious to even a kid that there is something wrong. Why would Brigadier (did we say Brigadier??) Mirza not smell a rat earlier ? When Charu, his former wife lands up in the US, the former CIA spy, Ravi shows a lot of anxiety but keeps glossing over the obvious red flags . The informer in Dhaka apparently has a problem that she always sneezes three times; in the scene where the protagonist is staking out the suspect, she ends up sneezing but only once..how convenient !... Or that irritating woman acting as the US ambassador in India, addressing the minister with the condescending “Mishra ji…”. And who casts pony tailed whites with zero acting and dialogue delivery skills as agents from Langley? Come on, we are no more in the nineties.. And come a long way since ham handed acting or glaring inconsistencies in the narrative!
#Khufiya on #Netflix may be a #VishalBharadwaj film but seems like an amateurish, disjointed effort that has the ammunition but does not fire. The gunpowder was perhaps left out in the rain!
Krishna Mehra (#Tabu) is a RAW agent who loses her asset in Dhaka . She goes after the mole in the agency Ravi Mohan (#AliFazal) who has now moved to South Dakota in the US. She facilitates his wife Charu (#WamiqaGabbi) to move there in search of her young son and exacts revenge on the puppet and the puppeteer in a ham handed climax that leaves you disappointed after the run time of 2 hours and 37 minutes.
The #VishalBhardwaj touch is strikingly obvious though. The film provides the women leads an agency that only his script does. #Tabu looks older, wiser and sometimes her weather beaten face is an indicator of all the trauma she has lived through. Her 19 year old son does not think much about her and the relationship is on tethers. Her love, Heena (Bangladeshi actor #AzmeriHaqueBadhon) is killed in Dhaka on a mission. The only person who understands her is her ex-husband (#AtulKulkarni in a wonderful appearance). The Bharadwaj - Tabu combine goes back a long way - all the way to 1995 when they worked together in #Maachis.
#AzmeriHaqueBadhon is impish, oozes sexuality and her body language speaks far more than her vocabulary of Bangla smitten with a few words of Hindi. The problem though is that the film appears like two or three standalone stories loosely strung together as a film. Heena’s role is too sketchy; this is one character you genuinely feel like getting to know more about. The only scene worth any weight is the one where Krishna barges into her house while she is cooking for her ailing father.
#WamiqaGabbi plays Charu, the wife of Ravi. This is perhaps the character with multiple layers of gray and yet does not rise to its potential. She lives with her husband, son and mother-in-law and does not have any inkling of what her family does. That is quite a difficult one to fathom. She lives a parallel life in her cocoon where she smokes up and seductively dances to old hits like #YehJawaaniHaiDeewani. If this was a #SujoyGhosh film, i would say that the audience would have kept wondering what the catch was. There is one scene where she looks directly at the camera and says “Chal Joothi” almost as if mocking Krishna and her colleagues who are forever observing people through surveillance cameras.
#NavnindraBehl plays Ravi’s mother, who comes across as diabolic at times, plain stupid at other times and generally all over the place. She is what an actor gone rogue would be like; the only funny scene is where she complains about having to do all the housework in the US.
#Khufiya is based on the book “Escape to Nowhere” by #AmarBhushan. Interestingly, there is a gender switch here; the book has a male character playing Krishna’s role. Talking of the men characters, there is #AshishVidyarthi playing Jeev, Krishna’s boss at the agency. The script is co-written by #VishalBharadwaj and #RoshanNerula. The genre of the film is a cross between a spy thriller and a revenge drama cutting across three countries ; in some ways the agency folks spend a lot of time observing their suspects. There is none of the glamor of the Hollywood spy sagas; on the contrary Krishna and the tussle that she has with her personal life portrays how difficult it is to lead a double life!
What I could not fathom though was that the agency manages to find enough evidence against Ravi early on. Why do they continue to watch him and his family? As a matter of fact, Ravi has nothing much to do in the first half except walk around with the documents and photocopy them on camera!
I thought Krishna was a character they could have exploited far more. She is torn between her work and the seductive Heena. In the opening sequence, Krishna is heard describing the ‘mole between the collarbones’ of Heena. Later in the film, she refuses to stare at Charu as she dances sensually. One of the songs incidentally is #MatAaana” sung by #RekhaBhardwaj. Music is composed by #Gulzaar , #Bharadwaj and #RahulRam, who also plays a Guru and ends up doing a concert or two in the US and in what is another convenient move, joins hands with Krishna.
One thing you should watch out for is the cinematography by #FarhadAhmedDehlvi. The frames are taut and the lighting is neo noir and adds a tad to the narrative.
There is also the mandatory reference to Shakespeare. The agency uses code names - Ravi is Brutus, Charu is Portia and Krishna is Cactus.
Overall, #Khufiya is neither coherent nor consistent. There is nothing khufiya about the plot and you end up plodding through the mess. Characters have not been fleshed out, scenes are underwritten and the plot is handled poorly. The film ends with Krishna calling up her son as if to provide some closure to an aspect that was never explained and always half-baked. I feel like saying that there was potential that could have been realized but #Khufiya ends up as a bits and pieces story. The only thought I would leave you with is that this one was perhaps better off as a series than a feature film.
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