The oddly-titled Manorama Six Feet Under didn’t catch my attention when it was first released. But a big chest bump to Jabberwock for turning me on to this indie flick. I loved this deliberately-paced gem, one of the best Hindi flicks I’ve seen in a long while.

This film adapts Roman Polanski’s Chinatown to small town Rajasthan. It applies genre techniques to Hindi film — what Dil Chahta Hai did as an urban movie, Manorama does as film noir. In this adaptation, the California Water Wars come to full flower in the Rajasthani desert. Abhay Deol (Honeymoon Travels) plays a morally flawed water engineer and failed pulp novelist who stumbles upon a tangle of political corruption and murder. Vinay Pathak is his brother-in-law, a local police chief with a thick, twangy accent. His sounds like the rolled n’s of Haryanvi and Bhojpuri. Raima Sen and Sarika are femme fatales, Gul Panag the engineer’s wife, Kulbhushan Kharbanda the politician, and no one’s hands are clean.

Manorama’s desert noir look combines brilliant deserts and buildings, with dark interiors. Its æsthetic reminds me of U Turn, the world going to hell amid a shimmery desert mirage. Its symbolism revolves around fish in aquariums, a heavy-handed metaphor about big fish and small fry. The movie replicates the slick formality of Hollywood noir with great cinematography and style to spare. You could fill an entire post with memorably-framed shots, but two spring to mind immediately: a flashy, if overdone, crane shot with rain falling vertically upon Deol and family Black Rain-style, and a taxi carrying Deol off into a rose-tinted desert sunset. Sweeney Todd showed us how to make a gloomy musical, but this movie has no songs.

I’d never before seen comedy veteran Pathak play a menacing character. The transformation is as shocking as Boman Irani going from murderer (Being Cyrus) to clown (Khosla Ka Ghosla). It’s also the first time I’ve seen Deol in a significant role. He’s still passive, but fills out his Anil Kapoor moustache and puffy hair with ineffectual brooding. Sen is delectable and chilling.

The movie falters at the end when it stops trusting the audience and pauses for some hasty exposition. Up to that point, it’s all slow-build tension, quality and mood. Debutante director Navdeep Singh’s cinematography is more deliberate than ad films, with much longer cuts.

Jabberwock wrote:

… film noir doesn’t have to be all about dark shadows or smoky black-and-white cinematography. The nighttime here… is principally the nighttime of the soul… [it] briefly nods at Antonioni’s Blow-Up… Some shots also reminded me of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, with the severed ear in the ground and the suggestion of a tranquil surface hiding unsavoury things… This is a confident, accomplished film. [Link]

Others were similarly enamored:

This film is an absolute must-see. If there’s one film you choose to see this year, please let it be this one… meticulous attention is paid to the appearances - I suppress a smile watching Nimmi in a dressing gown, a bright yellow petticoat visible underneath, sitting out on the front porch peeling vegetables. Middle-class India is out on display. SV’s nosy neighbor enquires about the new motorbike, and his wife sitting out in the garden keeps an interested eye on the goings-on in the Singh household…

Our protagonist’s life, much like the desert, is dry and sterile and crumbling. It’s slow, mired in heat and dust and travels at the speed of SV’s old scooter (which his wife calls a tin-box). It’s harried - the tap dries up when SV has a bath, there’s a fly in his chai (tea), and all’s rocky on the homefront… [Link]

Manorama is a whydunit about big fish and little fish coexisting in the sleaze of a nondescript desert town… I wish I’d caught Manorama earlier, but it didn’t receive a wide theatrical release, and - of course - when you’re in Chennai, you resign yourself to the fact that such quirky little Hindi-indies will never see the light of a projection booth near you. [Link]

Here’s the trailer:

Update: Here’s the director’s bio (thanks, brown_dbd):

Navdeep studied film at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena after working as a self taught animator in New Delhi. He’s done advertising films since 1997 in LA, London and Bombay. Manorama Six Feet Under is his first feature. [Link]

And how the title was chosen:

Uljhan [Dilemma], Bhoolbhulaiyan, Jal Bin Machhli [Fish Out of Water]. These were just some of the… titles bandied about because the producers hated the current name… The script was originally just Manorama… everyone I pitched it to thought it was a women-oriented subject, and that’s instant death in most Bombay film circles… Manorama has a greater debt in terms of plot to Kiss Me Deadly than any other film…

[Another script] was set in L.A., my onetime home, where I had written it and I arrived in Bombay thinking I would just adapt it to a local setting. Wrong… Different people. Different values. Different issues. [Link]

Previously: Phillum noir: Manorama Six Feet Under , Return of the prodigal beti , Indian punch , What’s the matter with Gujarat?