Chocolate

Director: Vivek Agnihotri

Cast: Anil Kapoor, Tanushree Dutta, Arshad Warsi, Emran Hashmi, Irrfan Khan, Suniel Shetty, Sushma Reddy

6/10

The crust of hollywood is there for all to see in the sleek promos that invite you to unravel its “deep, dark secrets”. Delve deeper and you discover that the core of Chocolate is the Bryan Singer-directed 90s film, The Usual Suspects. Let the taste sink in and you find that adman-turned-filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri’s technique is an assimilation of the flavours of a dozen-odd masters of the thriller noir. The good news is that this debutant director’s film about a con game involving five Indian protagonists and a crack criminal lawyer in winter-swathed London does not turn bitter despite the overdose of inspiration.

Agnihotri displays an ability to raise the element of mystery along with the narrative, which is not what you can say about most other Hollywood-inspired directors. At the beginning, everyone on the screen knows more than what the audience does. But as the layers are peeled off one by one, everything you think you know turns around, including a climax that questions the very premise of the film.

Anil Kapoor plays a hotshot lawyer ? if any evidence of his pre-eminence is required, there is a picture of him shaking hands with Tony Blair on a sidetable ? saddled with the responsibility of bailing out two Indians without quite knowing whether they are innocent. It is the first time Anil’s character is in a dilemma and the duo’s contradictory versions of how they and three other friends were involved in a heist and a bomb blast on a boat add to his predicament.

Much of the confusion stems from the character of PP, a struggling artist-musician with a special talent for turning fiction into fact and vice versa. For the film to work, PP, who supplies the majority of the exposition and narration, needed to be as convincing to the audience as to the lawyer trying to save his skin. That’s where the brilliance of Irrfan Khan comes in. The surprise in the ensemble cast is Tanushree Dutta, seductively conniving one moment and a bit like a deer caught by the headlights immediately after. The rest, particularly Arshad Warsi, play their parts just as well to make Chocolate a gripping, if not great, thriller.

Ritu Parna Datta