The arc of demure feelings onscreen has usually followed a predictable graph, more often than not, the introversive character taking the higher road of being there for their objet d’affection, much like a lurking—not stalking—woebegone cloak that’s ready to quickly step up to an inimical situation with the same alacrity that they stepped down to make way for another person in the eventual beaming family portrait. That moral science demanded a clean equation of personas meant that the hovering piece of blubber had to be eliminated for good, and they duly stepped in front of a bullet or put some lead into themselves, resolving a potential life-long conflict of a three-way configuration that ensured that the audience left with total HD clarity on the future of all concerned. The movie watcher of today is more open to ambiguity—both in story-telling and morality.
Director Sujoy Ghosh’s Jaane Jaan (Love of My Life), while weaving threads of a silent attraction into a taut first half, raises the delicious prospect of a three-way manipulation that’s strung on the stakes of love and attraction. Based on the endlessly fascinating book, The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino, the movie—written by the director and Raj Vasant—levers on the silent and gauche behavior of Naren aka Teacher (Jaideep Ahlawat) who, underneath his shuffling unease, hides a bunker-full of feelings for his neighbor in Kalimpong. That would be Maya D’Souza (Kareena Kapoor Khan), who works at the local café —quaintly named Tiffin—and is the subject of soft-touch ragging from the staff about daily patron Teacher who queues up not for its egg fried rice but Maya, who’s his ticking heartbeat behind the counter. Maya’s world, however, seems to have little mind space for her dumbstruck suitor. She’s got Tara (Naisha Khanna), her daughter, who’s friend and companion, the love of her life, and a pain in the ass. In short, a perfect mother-daughter combo.
What disturbs this equilibrium in the little world that director Ghosh constructs in the little town is the arrival of Ajit Mhatre (a spine-chilling Saurabh Sachdeva), who quickly flits from the café into Maya’s home and as swiftly finds himself at the wrong end of an immersion water heater garrotte after a tense scene of showdown. It’s now up to Teacher to step up and calculate the odds and evens of getting mother-daughter out of a potential jail relocation. Perhaps the weakest link in the story is how the calculative teacher—who also practices dōjō—gets rid of a body. That bit never comes up across the arc, and you wonder if that was just another brick in the wall that didn’t matter. But it does, considering the story’s set in a town where everyone knows the Teacher—a walk in the opening scenes as the teacher sets off to the café before going to the local school shows everyone greeting him, including the fleeting glance of a faceless face. So, how did he do it?
We’ll never know, but in a completely disconnected case, cop Karan (Vijay Varma)—a composite of two characters from the novel—comes sniffing for a missing Mhatre and finds himself entangled between the two neighbors. It’s here that a hazy triangle of attraction and skullduggery begins between the three, and director Ghosh keeps the cords tight and yet leaves enough room for surmises. While Teacher Naren’s feelings for Maya are as plain as a right-triangle hypotenuse, Karan’s initially crude references to her as ‘super-hot’ slowly give way to a wink-and-nudge flirtation: or is it him turning his charm on her to dig out clues that seem tantalizingly and frustrating within and yet out of reach? Or is it she who’s controlling the merry-go-around? A karaoke bar sequence plays the classic Laxmikant-Pyarelal track Aa Jaane Jaan (Intaqam)—the director adds his own twist for Rahul Dev Burman fans who, if at all, expected it to be the twinkly disco ball Jaane Jaan (Sanam Teri Kasam)—though there’s plenty of the composer apart from Rajesh Roshan and Sachin Dev Burman playing in the background in the cozy Tiffin. In the title song sequence, the stage sizzles with an undercurrent of desire and sexual tension that finds Maya and Karan cavorting, a throwback to a dancer-customer transaction, but the question remains: who’s who here?
While the denouement and planning will now seem delibates from Jeethu Joseph’s crafty Drishyam, an ironic offscreen offshoot was the legal wheels that were set in motion on behalf of what’d eventually be the movie under review. However, it’s the basis of the planning calculations, both in the novel and the movie, that comes across a force fit —an unsolved mathematical problem that posits its verification and findability in the spatial frame of time that Naren here calls out as the basis for all that he does. That P versus NP seemingly points to a climax where P = Naren Poor.
Jaane Jaan can seem like an arrow-straight, thin as an arrowroot biscuit of a movie, given that the theorization that occurs is based on academic mania contused with the variables and variegations of love and attraction. Layering it on, however, are the actors. Vijay Varma, seemingly taking a break from his oeuvre of twisted characters, soaks in the smoothness of being the hunter. His act is sharp, twisty, and laced with a smart-ass gloat that adds an unexpected velocity of frisson to the chilling cinematography by Avik Mukhopadhyay. Jaideep Ahlawat is a study in the understated masterclass. His deliberate, hopeful, and yet hopeless character is nuanced by the uncertain persona that the actor dons. His Naren is a social interloper, dragged down and buoyed by his genius; if love can’t find a way to him, he’s determined to find a way for his love, even if the consequences are for him to bear.
As Maya, Kareena Kapoor Khan is flawless, her performance pitch at a frequency that’s out of sync with her co-actors, and yet has a sizzle and static that connects them all. She’s a quiet riot of conflict and survival instinct, simultaneously digging into her sensual and maternal side. And it’s with Maya that director Ghosh pulls off a P versus NP with us. She may not know her mathematics, but she sure knows how to draw a perfect relationship triangle, the sum of whose two sides will never be greater than hers.
Movie data powered by IMDb. All images owned by the producers. Jaane Jaan is streaming on Netflix and rated A (For adults only)
Jaane Jaan
Director Sujoy Ghosh Time 2h19m
Writers Sujoy Ghosh, Raj Vasant, Keigo Higashino (based on the book by)
Stars Kareena Kapoor Khan, Jaideep Ahlawat, Vijay Varma
