Atul Sabharwal’s Berlin is a double-weave of a conspiracy thriller and a study of political currents intersecting with personal ambition. Berlin’s beguiling take on the espionage movie spins on an uncommon theme as well as a sure sense of time and place.
The title of Sabharwal’s third feature refers to a cafe in Delhi that serves as a meeting point for intelligence agents from various countries. The restaurant dishes out intrigue along with chocolate eclairs and vegetable puffs. The staff of deaf-mute waiters play a key role in maintaining secrecy.
The actual Berlin isn’t that far away. It’s 1993. The Cold War has ended. The wall that divided East Germany from West Germany has come down. Yet, nostalgia for the sureties of more clearly delineated times drives events.
The delightfully named sign language teacher Pushkin Verma is one of the reminders of Indo-Soviet bonhomie. Pushkin (Aparshakti Khurana) is summoned by Jagdish (Rahul Bose), an officer in the plainly-named Bureau, to interrogate Ashok (Ishwak Singh).
Ashok can neither hear nor speak, but he has sharp eyes and fire in the belly. Is Ashok the key to a plot to assassinate the Russian premier during a visit to Delhi, as Jagdish insists? Or is Ashok a fall guy, as Pushkin comes to believe?
The 119-minute Hindi movie is out on ZEE5. Sign language is vital to Sabharwal’s screenplay too.
Hand gestures give shape to a nebulous conspiracy that includes a mysterious unnamed woman (Anupriya Goenka). Jagdish and the rival organisation Wing headed by Raman (Deepak Qazir Kejriwal) are racing against time, with Jagdish’s boss (Kabir Bedi) piling on the pressure.
The slow-burning narrative, smoothly edited by Irene Dhar Malik, is suffused with moody atmospherics. Cinematographer Shreedutta Namjoshi’s colour palette is dominated by dull greens, greys and browns. Pushkin’s exertions unfolds against exemplars of Delhi’s version of Brutalist architecture.
While Berlin has a host of secondary characters, the movie is ultimately down to Aparshakti Khurana and Ishwak Singh, who are excellent as soul brothers discovering secrets about each other and the deep state while confined to a basement.
Khurana brings out Pushkin’s sheer ordinariness and reserves of heroism. Singh evokes Ashok’s enigma and fundamental sweetness through carefully judged expressions.
The movie is on the money about its men, some of them principled and others loathsome. However, there isn’t enough room in this nearly all-male world for Anupriya Goenka’s woman, who is as wispy as the grand plan itself.
While Rahul Bose is lethal as Jagdish, his occasional slides into hyperbole stick out in a carefully calibrated narrative. There are times when Berlin’s pacing feels too deliberate, its stacking of intrigue unwarranted.
Yet, Berlin is gripping in its own fashion, skillfully deploying deafness as both metaphor and weapon. Sabharwal meshes the melancholy of John Le Carré novels with the foreboding quality of Alan J Pakula’s films to imagine Delhi as the stage for a pantomime of democracy. The movie is an unique contribution to the spy fiction genre, set in a world that has never been seen before on the Indian screen.
‘Berlin’ director Atul Sabharwal: ‘A love letter to an undocumented time gone by’
