No Smoking

DIRECTOR: Anurag Kashyap

No Smoking is no good. Not because it doesn’t have a superb idea. It does. But because it is too bizarre, too outré, too out of it. It stops us from connecting.

K (John) is a nicotine addict. He smokes like there’s no tomorrow. At work. At play. In the bath-tub. In the bedroom. In bed, confesses his despairing wife (Ayesha) to a dinner-party companion. He’s driven, finally, to Prayogshala, a way-below-the-ground maze, where he’s forced into a Faustian bargain by Baba Bengali (Paresh), on the lines of a contract signed by a Stephen King short story hero: no ciggies, no soul.

Kashyap’s K (okay, okay, we've also read Kafka) starts off being a character we are genuinely curious about. John, in oversized shades, sexy stubble, and super-sexy torso, even pulls off a Taxi Driver moment, when he scowls in the mirror: “no one tells me what to do. No one.”

It could be a leitmotif for the director’s journey. Clearly, no one told Kashyap what to do in Paanch, his absolutely brilliant but still-sadly unreleased debut , which uses darkness and an almost obsessive yearning for the different, in a manner which is both shocking and searing. His Black Friday, a re-construction of the Bombay riots, is first-rate. Both movies would unhesitatingly find a place on Best Hindi cinema lists.

But No Smoking takes us, and him, to a place Bollywood’s never been before. And that's the film’s only virtue. You take note of, detachedly, the scenarists' zeal in creating the surreal hell, very Kafka-esque, that K is surrounded by. But you don’t really care about what happens to him, not even when he loses, in succession, his hearing, his fingers, and, his self.