It occurred again!
Anurag Kashyap had done it again! ‘No Smoking’ was a freakishly Film eximious that busted the floor convention of the long-established Hindi cinema norms. It would only be appropriate to instigate this film appreciation with a stroke on the back and a hurrah for director Anurag Kashyap along with approbation for producers Kumar Mangat and Vishal Bharadwaj for sponsoring an endeavour such as this. The promos lived up to the puff and captured the experience of what lies internally. Though they did not let slip much about the plot, only ingeniously speaking of the nucleus design on which the film was structured.
Looking other than John Abraham’s toned physique and six packs; the spirit of the film was more demure than represented by its psychotropic peripherals. Though the nub of the film is designed with the aim of targeting smoking as a health risks at the pedestal, the enthusiastic spectator will be proficient enough in sketching parallels to the individual consciousness and scrutinize his subsistence as an unrevealing and ambiguous body in the world. With syntactic shrewdly interlaced into the mise en scène of every single shot, the film No Smoking leaves plethora to the mind and construal of the viewer. The name of the game is just one word, abstraction. The splendour of ‘No Smoking’ lays in the piece of evidence that Anurag Kashyap bestows his viewers the complete liberty to deduce or read between the lines the optical in accordance with their state of mind.
‘Bizarre Dream’, two words to illustrate the experience of ‘No Smoking’. The film moves backward and forward between actuality and fantasy leaving a thin line to be discovered by the viewers to make a distinction between truth and narrative. Whether it’s the insolence of John Abraham or the piercing demeanour of Ayesha Takia, ‘No Smoking’ takes a dreamlike look at the substratal. ‘No Smoking’ makes for a strange, soul searching experience by watchfully constructing “war of the elements” effect.
John Abraham plays the character of ‘K’, an infatuated neurotic smoker who finds orgasmic contentment from rolling over his pack of cigarettes sprawling out in his bathtub. Ayesha Takia plays the role of K’s Wife, Anjali. Embarrased by K’s obsession with smoking, Anjali comes to a decision to leave K one day. Jolted by the setback and determined to get his wife back, K agrees to undergo a unique de-addiction program recommended by his bosom friend Abbas Tyrewala, played by Ranvir Shourey.
When K first goes to ‘Prayogshala’ (the rehab centre) he is met by a guruji (Paresh Rawal). Guruji makes known that those who have managed to place their footsteps in his property have always left with sustenance for their addictive way of life. K gives his approval by signing a contract which proclaims that he would put up with all the directives and command of the Guruji to help him put the boot on his habit. However, there’s a twist, and an alarming one. Guruji presages the caution that after leaving the Prayogshala, if K ever takes up a cigarette again, he would end up meting out damage on his family. Knocked for six by the warnings issued by Guruji, John hastily closes the eyes to the promises and lights up his first cigarette. A car crash takes place and K loses his sense of hearing. Horror-struck by the events and Guruji’s knack of relentlessly monitoring his activities, K takes an expedition around the world to break away from Guruji’s shadow. Feeling relieved by the extensive jaunt and safe that in no way Guruji could mark out his location, K lights up his second cigarette. Soon K, in a shocking turnaround, receives a call that his brother’s life is jeopardize after lighting up the second cigarette. K turns suspicious of Guruji’s ghostlike powers.
K starts to get phantasms of the future events if he continued smoking building up a mania. K gets trepidations leaving his apprehensive of each and everyone he meets. But the nightmarish events continue even as K tries to mend his ways. He envisions that he is strained to light another cigarette in a way similar to how he forced his friend Abbas in the past. Panicked by the penalties, K starts to believe that Guruji has murdered his wife Anjali because he had lit up one cigarette. K, by now, is completely wrapped up in terror. He imagines that the cops have arrested him for killing his wife Anjali. In a proposition to prove himself wrong he dares them to smoke another cigarette and prove to them that his cigarette smoking routine is undeniably the perpetrator at the back of his wife’s casualty. As he smokes, pictures of his brother trying to kill himself shade the screen with dismay.
In this way, ‘No Smoking’ coasts between fancy and truth effortlessly surveying the machinery of K’s internal institution and psyche. After the roller coaster ride, the movie culminates with K fear of surrendering his character to the evil within him. Eventually undergoing reformation, K starts helping others to wrestle their battles just as he did.
The most attention-grabbing piece of the movie ‘No Smoking’ is K’s evaluating and scrutinizing his own hallucinations. Most of the hallucinations are employed as similes which are analogously painted to real world circumstances. Case in point, the central theme of the movie, smoking itself is used as allegory to depict how one’s addictions can obscure one’s own mind. The vainglorious behaviour of John Abraham in the film speaks briefly about how inward looking obsession our loves shape up in the crazy pursuit of the sphinx-like. The will-o’-the-wisp of John Abraham’s wife Anjali turning to his sought-after secretary Annie denotes the needs of human self. The film is homage to how we try to seek things outside our own and end up losing our souls by disregarding the small compassionate acts that would improve our lives and those of around us. It also alludes to the natural spontaneous order of the world where good and bad squabble but the triumph of good prevails.
Brimming with plenty of symbolism and sign language, deciphering the subliminal messages in the movie in it merits couple more rounds to the cinema halls. The film has multiple highs; some striking bits of moments include a group of children pounding up a mannequin model and a group of Santa Clauses walking past K referring to ascendancy and mirages that are intrinsic to his own character. The sequence where Ranvir and John are made to act out their teens, cloaked in sepia, is appealing and hilarious. The sequence where K’s spirit tries to intermingle with him through the glass window is tremendous. Another fascinating reference is the sequence where a group of missing souls shriek out from inside the incarceration gates out to the nattily decent man walking past them unconscious of what he is getting into.
The film is a tour de force that provides the viewers the sovereignty to chew over rather than avow background which for the most part of the contemporary movies does. Anurag Kashyap’s direction is completely A Grade! No Smoking is an additional grand slam. Though the dissimilarity between fact and fiction could’ve been more discrete for the sake of intellectual capacity, we markdown it as Kashyap’s imaginative intention. Amending any bit of this masterpiece would’ve been blasphemy. But one thing that’ll make you cower and recoil with cringe is the Bipasha Basu item number that the movie ends with. What an utter waste! It doesn’t belong there and leaves the viewer with a sour taste in the mouth.
Editing of Aarti Kashyap is silky. Cinematography by Rajeev Ravi is enormously out of this world. He administers efficiently to spectacularly capture the unresponsive colour that verbalizes several dimensions of the subject. Music by Vishal Bharadwaj crystallizes marvellously with the surroundings. It lends a psychedelic experience to the movie and amplifies the surreal pitch.
John Abraham, after Jism, was clearly the prince of the entire movie. There are certain roles which are tailor-made for his persona and K ranked well above. His style and magnetism are captivating. Ayesha Takia felt like a lost cause with diminutive capacity for performance. Ranvir Shorey and Paresh Rawal are gleaming with brilliance.
In a whole, No Smoking leaves you buoyant with exultation by the end of it. Elegantly engraved and tastefully accessible, ‘No Smoking’ is an extremely fanatical movie that manages to bowl you over with fright, fear and amaze. No Smoking is art. A supreme must watch for admirers of good cinema.
