Manorama, Six Feet Under

DIRECTOR: Navdeep Singh

Lakhot, a sleepy desert outpost that time has forgotten, the surface of its small-town ordinariness marred by deceipt, death, and oozing corruption. And an ordinary man, living out an ordinary life, pitchforked into the murky goings-on, who uncovers the layers, and redeems himself, in the process.

Manorama, Six Feet Under, former ad-man Navdeep Singh's remarkably atmospheric first feature is that rare Bollywood creature: it’s unabashedly noir in the way it's styled, with a superb sense of place and character. And it tells a crackling good yarn, while at it.

Suspended PWD engineer Satyaveer (Abhay) is called to his door in the middle of the night by a mysterious woman (Sarika) who wants him to shadow her husband, the area’s powerful MLA. Everyman hero SV, who’s also a failed writer of detective fiction, takes her money, and sets out to the palace with his cheap camera to catch P P Rathore (Kulbhushan) in some red-hot action.

What he gets, instead, is a troubled young woman, her face half-covered with a dupatta, an altercation, and a ghostly old woman in a wheelchair. The deed is done, and SV gets back to his life — riding the empty, dusty roads, sniping at unhappy wife Nimmi (Gul), and cribbing to brother-in-law Brij Mohan, a canny cop at the local thana (Vinay Pathak). And then the late night caller dies a brutal death. Suddenly, nothing is as it seems. Manorama, was that even her real name? How did she die? What was in the missing camera roll? What is going on in Lakhot?

The delightful plot is inspired by the wildly popular pulp fiction novellas of the 60s and 70s in magazines like Manohar Kahaniyaan, and Satya Katha. Full marks for invention, and real-life, quirky characters, even if the pace sometimes falters. The foul-mouthed Brij Mohan, who’s cusswords have been inexplicably blipped out here (if Saif in Omkara was allowed to use the 'b' word', why not poor Vinay Pathak), the two goons who cheerfully beat up SV (one of them is queasy about breaking fingers!), even the striped fish in the home-aquariums , have character.

After Ek Chalis Ki Last Local, Abhay Deol cements his place as a thinking, intelligent actor who is unafraid to experiment. Gul’s full-bodied wife is a pleasant surprise. And Vinay Pathak steals every scene, effortlessly.

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