Irrfan Khan paid a flying visit to the Toronto International Film Festival to attend the world premiere of his new film Guilty, a dramatisation of a real-life 2008 double-murder case that took place in Noida, a satellite city outside of New Delhi.
The Bollywood star portrays Ashwin Kumar, a detective called in to assess and endorse the initial police finding that the parents of 14-year-old Aarushi Talwar killed her and their house servant as part of an honour killing. Instead, he becomes convinced the parents are innocent and suspects the father’s assistant committed the crime.
Written and produced by Vishal Bhardwaj (director of the Hamlet remake Haider) and directed by Meghna Gulzar, the movie presents three possible versions of the murder in a narrative structure that pays homage to the classic Japanese film Rashomon.
It is a wonderful script. The film is a classic whodunit, most reminiscent of the work of the great American director Sydney Lumet, who made 12 Angry Men and Dog Day Afternoon.
Speaking to Khan on the day of the film’s premiere, the actor reveals that he didn’t pay much attention to the case when it happened, but was aware of it.
”I don’t actually follow these crime stories,” says Khan. “But it was so much in the news that it was hard to avoid. The case was such that we were forced to take notice because of the morality of it. So I became really curious about what happened.”
To get into character, he says he had to be convinced that the parents were not responsible for the murders.
“I had to depend on the facts to become the character,” he say. “In films that are fictitious, where sometimes you don’t have to find the facts, the condition is that you have to be convinced by what the character is doing. In this film it was not like that – you have to be convinced by the facts. So, in the process, there were so many questions that are not in the script and we questioned many people to find out this version of the truth.”
His role is a clever piece of casting by the filmmakers, because when Khan steps onto the screen you immediately become convinced by his conviction. He is damning of the police investigation and, by implication, an Indian judicial system that takes such a long time to try cases. The maladministration of the judicial system was the focus of Court, a hugely successful Indian film that has played at festivals this past year.
“We are still carrying the system that the British gave us and we haven’t upgraded that system and we need to look at that,” says Khan.” We need to find the relevance of those laws – there are so many redundant laws and there is no one there to build the reform. We have so many politicians, but they are not reformists and we desperately need reformists in society.”
He also is critical of the media, who he feels was all too content to simply repeat the narrative told to journalists by police and not question the facts of the case.
“Some publications pronounced the judgment of what happened and others disagreed but, because of the court verdict, there was a kind of closure and the media was successful in creating a perception about the case, which I think is a little dangerous, for media to do that,” he says.
“They can raise the question, but forming people’s perception or giving them a ready-made answer, for democracy, this is not good. It should be questioned and that is what we are doing in the film.”
The 48-year-old actor was impressed by the work of director Gulzar.
“The director invested a lot in the story,” he says. “She has a vision of the story and that was what gave me a kind of assurance that she would be able to pull off this story, which was so complicated and sensitive and had this balance between what different characters believe.”
The case is incredibly complex and the beauty of the film is that it doesn’t make a judgment about what is the definitive version of the truth.
“This is what we wanted to show – that no one truth is definitive,” says Bhardwaj. “The problem in this kind of script is that things repeat, so the whole issue was not to bore people with the same thing again and again, so everyone had different versions of what happened.
“For example, small details, such as the weapon used to murder someone: one team thinks the murder weapon that killed the 14-year-old was a machete, the second group feels that it was a golf club that killed her. So I kept writing the script even while we were shooting.”
artslife@thenational.ae