Chinatown in Bollywood. Is that possible? Well, that’s exactly what director Navdeep Singh wants to achieve with his first film Manorama — Six Feet Under. A tribute to the Roman Polanski classic starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, Navdeep’s film stars Abhay Deol, Raima Sen, Gul Panag and Vinay Pathak.

Ask Navdeep about the Chinatown inspiration and he is categorical and chooses his words carefully: “We are so sensitive about this whole issue that we keep ripping off full movies. Manorama is a homage to the film noir genre and not Chinatown in particular. Yes, there are a couple of plot points similar to the Polanski film and we realised that there was no way we could get around it. So I even put in a reference by making Abhay watch Chinatown on television in the movie. Hopefully people will get the tribute and not call it a copy.”

So let’s look at the synopses of the two movies to decide. Chinatown was about Los Angeles private investigator Jake Gittes (Nicholson) who is hired by a woman (Dunaway) to spy on her husband. Gittes later learns that the woman who hired him is not the wife!

In Manorama, SV (Abhay) is a government engineer but his real ambition has always been writing detective fiction. His life takes a turn when the wife of a powerful local politician asks him to play a real-life detective by spying on her husband. Upon completion of his assignment, SV discovers that the woman is not who she claims to be.

And if that wasn’t enough, if Chinatown dealt with California’s water wars, Manorama revolves around Rajasthan’s water politics. “The way I look at it is that it is a post-modern approach at re-contextualising similar plot points,” says Navdeep. “Like Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs did with City on Fire.”

Navdeep, who had earlier made commercials like the Milano ad with Hrithik, showed a rough cut of the film at the Osian’s Cinefan Festival where Manorama got a great response. “Everyone can relate to the film because despite being a thriller it is about how complacent all of us have become about corruption,” says the maker. “Because as soon as we are giving 50 rupees to the traffic constable, we are all indulging in it.”

While Abhay plays the investigating officer in Manorama, the fake wife is played by Gul with Raima as his love interest. “I picked Abhay because he was ready to do the homework required for the role,” Navdeep explains. “Gul’s character was getting difficult to cast but after I saw Dor, I knew she was the one. As for Raima, there is a certain level of innocence in her which is difficult to find in other actors.”

Film noir has never been properly explored in Bollywood but Navdeep believes Manorama can change all that when it arrives on September 21.