Indian cinema is really a surprise now, with another high-scoring masterpiece recently, and the score is still rising.
When I first paid attention, it was only 8.5 points, and now more than 10,000 people have watched it, and the score has risen by 0.1.
That's right, this year is about this Indian film "The Tuner".
Compared to regular Indian films, the film is also worth looking forward to, it is adapted from the 2010 French short film "The Tuner". This is also a Douban god work, with nearly 140,000 reviews and a rating of 9.2.
Therefore, unlike the popular Indian films in the past two years, this film is neither a blockbuster with songs and dances, nor too many needles and tricks that reflect social reality.
In contrast, this is a suspense film with a plot constantly reversed and full of black humor.
The film continues the core of the film: the pianist male protagonist, pretending to be "blind", unknowingly becomes an eyewitness to a murder.
However, in comparison, the short film "The Tuner" is more of a very interesting idea, and "The Tuner" expands this idea into a richer and more complete black comedy.
The male protagonist of "The Tuner" is a depressed pianist who fails in the coveted piano competition. So, with a sense of revenge, he disguised himself as a blind piano tuner.
As a blind man, people tend to let their guard down on him, and he is able to gain insight into the untold side of other people's lives.
However, this dangerous game soon crossed the line: one day, he came to work in a family, unaware that a murder had just happened here...
He spied on the secret, but the secret itself was fatal.
The Tuner
This thirteen-minute short film, which itself has an open-ended ending with endless afterglow, will also make you long for more content to unfold. The Indian version of "The Tuner" successfully expands this premise into a long film, and the next development and direction can still not be out of the ordinary, which is quite rare.
However, this feature film does not extend too much on this open ending, but uses the original as the foundation, and each branch reproduces branches and leaves.
One of the major features is that the plot adds more reversals.
At the beginning of the film, we thought that the male protagonist Akash was blind. The plot paves a lot of his weakness as a blind man, such as the downstairs will be pranked by the little boy next door, and there will be dangers in crossing the street.
The most important thing is that his life seems to be calm, but it has a mysterious atmosphere, so that the audience can devote themselves to the plot from the beginning.
Meanwhile, a love story between Akash and his friend Sophia of the opposite sex begins to brew, and the air is filled with songs and melodies, and the tone of the film is still very Indian.
Next, we have the first reversal: Akash is actually pretending to be blind.
I have to sigh, Indian actors are still great.
Ayusman Kurana, who plays the male lead, is estimated to know not many people in China, but his performance is very layered, after all, there is a difference between pretending to be blind and becoming blind, and he has performed both performances very well.
In French short films, this transformation is mostly given by the narration of the male protagonist. But the film does not have an inner monologue, and he effectively relies on performance to convey the inner dilemma.
At the beginning of the film, we seem to be completely attracted by the trust that this character and his peaceful life gives us. However, just as we begin to adapt, we realize that things are not what they seem on the surface.
After that, the story enters the main topic, and we also enter the main part of the short film "Tuner" - pretending to be blind can bring countless conveniences to the male protagonist.
He was even invited by an old actor, Pramod, to perform a solo piano performance for his beloved wife on his wedding anniversary.
It was this invitation that complicated everything. Unknowingly, he was involved in a crime scene. I can't spoil it, so I won't explain this detail further.
From this point on, every suspense and danger in the film is made up of a series of mistakes made by Akash, each of which brings a series of "Murphy effects" to him and to his surroundings.
It can be felt that the director is still quite fanatic.
In the French short film, the male protagonist just mistakenly enters the home of an old couple and then discovers a murder.
But in this film, the important character is given a clearer identity: the old movie star.
The character itself, played by Indian star Ann Dehowan in the 1970s, is of course fictional, but the character's room is plastered with posters of the actor himself starring in movies in the past.
He spends a lot of time immersed in the glory of his past, and this gives the film a sense of truth and falsity, like norma Desmond, the movie star of Sunset Boulevard, highlighting the reality and constantly blackening itself. Acting is both yourself and not yourself.
To put it bluntly, it is to borrow the shell of his own identity and provide services for the needs of the plot.
In addition, the name of the male lead band at the end of the film is obviously a tribute to Aznavour, who played the pianist in Truffaut's Shoot the Pianist.
The Tuner
"Shoot the Pianist"
There are also many Hitchcock-esque themes in the film.
For example, a policeman's wife cooks a scene for the police, and the wife asks him how the meal is, and he swallows it and then answers that it's delicious. It's a lot of homage to a scene in Hitchcock's movie "Berserk", where the policeman's wife cooks for the police.
"Crazy Murder"
Back to the movie itself. After entering the main topic, the plot of the film is also more compact, and the middle part of the film does not give the audience a chance to blink, which is also due to the fact that the premise of the original version is too solid.
The two main characters— Pramod's scheming wife desperately want what she desires, and a tough unruly cop who often shows up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the cop's wife, all of whom form a new interaction with Aka.
Tabu, an actress who starred in "The Fantasy Drift of the Young Pi" and "Manslaughter and Concealment of Heaven", has always been a very strong actor, playing his wife Simi into three points, and what impressed me most about the film was her and her tricks.
She exhibits a range of emotions, from calm and composure, to clueless confusion, to meanness and control, which form the heart of the film.
Later, when the tricycle driver brother, the lottery ticket seller's sister and the old doctor also joined the game, they gradually occupied the center of the stage.
While they make a part of the story, they're not as interesting as the characters who dominated the first half, as deception and betrayal prevail as they make the story darker, step by step leading to the moral abyss.
The screenwriter connects many characters, events and motivations, constantly reversing the strong and weak relationships of the characters, like a food chain.
Everyone in front of the "blind" Akash said one thing and did another, even the neighbor kid, who initially gave the impression of a naïve naughty boy who loved to play harmless pranks, and eventually became greedy. Probably only the neighbor retired old lady, the old actor, Sophia is the only three decent characters in the film.
In terms of playwriting, it follows that "every character has a reason to exist", each character is like a director's pawn, and every move will surprise me.
Unfortunately, the second half lost its rhythm and focus, and the appearance of plots too many times (some of which really didn't work) killed this thriller that could have been better.
When the characters start explaining too much, the audience starts to lose interest. The lengthy dialogue between the characters slows down the tempo and the plot becomes a bit confusing and puzzling, but thankfully the climax and ending are back in one city.
However, the play relies on too many accidents to construct the plot, and accidental events always lead to a completely different time chain.
In the original "Tuner", the director set an open-ended ending.
However, the most important thing is not the ending, but the malice of human nature exposed in the story. The perspective behind the male protagonist's "invisible" and thus cleverly placing the audience in the perspective of the thief is also a very clever approach.
The director of "The Tuner" is also very powerful, and the production technique is absolutely skilled. We might as well think of this film as a successful thriller case, from the selection of the protagonist to the advancement of the plot, everything is textbook-level and orderly.
In the world of suspense films, screenwriters often use physically defective protagonists as "hooks" for suspense. For example, if the protagonist is blind, he is more able to move the plot forward. In this way, the character cannot be seen and the audience can see.
In the handling of suspense, the task of a good thriller is to make the vital parts seem insignificant and important.
A person goes to report the crime and bumps into the perpetrator; an elevator door leads to the crime scene; these very tense bridges can be expressed in a nearly accurate and natural way, knowing how much to reveal in each scene, and where to add elements of humor.
There are many more important parts that are left to the imagination. The purpose of this strategy is to keep the audience guessing.
For example, the film opens with a hunter chasing a blind rabbit. This seems like a great metaphor to convey the film's theme.
But as the plot progresses, even the rabbit in the opening that is thought to be just a metaphor has played its role in the end.
It also reminds me of the truck in The Lonely Hero From Ancient Times (1962), written by Dalton Trumbo, written in the same way.
In this movie, the plot is always hovering between blind and unblind, playing a game between fake and real.
Especially seeing the scene at the end of the film, it is really frightening. The story that Akash finally told Sophia certainly didn't really happen. The play once again leaves room for the audience to imagine, allowing the audience to deduce what the real story should be.
Even, in the end, it doesn't matter whether the tuner is really blind or not. Everyone is blinded, who is more blind?