Reconstructing a Crime Scene

CAST: Vidya Balan,Rani Mukerji,Myra,Rajesh Sharma,Mohammad Zeeshan,

Neil Bhoopalam

rating: ***

One warm Delhi night in 1999,a power-drunk lout took out a gun and shot a girl who refused to serve him a drink. There were several eye-witnesses to the crime. And most people present at the hot night-spot knew what had happened. But when the police tried building a case against the young man whose guilt was beyond question,it came up against the implacable,familiar wall that the powerful and the rich construct with such alarming ease against themselves and every one else. Witnesses turned hostile. No one saw anything. No one,ergo,killed Jessica.

Rajkumar Gupta’s new film draws a chillingly accurate picture of that cold-blooded murder in one of the best opening sequences I have seen recently. The frisson of knowing what had happened that fateful night doesn’t detract from the growing feeling of doom as you see a gorgeous young model,high on the good life she wants for herself and is on the brink of getting,heading inexorably towards her death. Debutant Myra perfectly captures the kind of carefree Delhi girl who knows she is a looker,and can get by,and get in,anywhere.

No One Killed Jessica manages to sustain interest as it makes its way to the climactic moment when the culprit,despite the best efforts of his politician father and his fawning courtiers,is nabbed. But the film fritters away some of the tension in trying to divide time equally between its two leading ladies: Vidya Balan plays Sabrina,Jessica’s sister,who fought for her with unflinching determination,with a reined-in desperation; Rani Mukerji is Meera,a feisty,foul-mouthed NDTV journalist who decides to take up cudgels on the dead girl’s behalf. Of the two,the former is more effective precisely because she’s quieter. Rani’s honey-eyed star reporter turn is much too outlined,sometimes unnecessarily so: saying “I am a bitch” frequently isn’t always a redeeming factor.

But this film is more than the sum of its actors’ abilities. It’s important because it brings to the big screen a kind of vivid realism that exploits a director’s prerogative to dramatise. Gupta gets good performances from his cast. The cop who is the first to hear the stumbling words of the killer: “Main goli kaan se do inch door chalaana chahta thaa.” The society woman who’s “not sure” if the man who shot at Jessica was indeed the killer,all the while spearing a piece of pastry into her mouth. The actor (Bhoopalam) who claims he didn’t know Hindi when he was asked to sign a statement. And the man (Zeeshan),clearly an outsider in “high society” parties who so wants to belong and the only way he can do it is to shower what he thinks of as a mere bar girl with thousand rupee notes,and when that doesn’t work,a gun. All these characters,so familiar to us from the news reports of the past decade,come tumbling out as a grim reminder that this is what happened then,and can happen now,because this,my friend,is Delhi,and anything is possible here: Amit Trivedi’s pulsating Dilli Dilli is an appropriate anthem for both the city and the film.

More than anything else,Gupta manages to pull off a film about media activism,and the enormous power of the people,and how they can explosively combine if harnessed for the greater good. If a TV channel hadn’t kept up the pressure on all fronts,we still wouldn’t have known who killed Jessica. Now we do. And that’s the real triumph of the film.