7 Khoon Maaf

*Spoiler Alert*

Happy marriages are all alike; every unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own way.

- with due apologies to Leo Tolstoy

In Susanna Anna-Marie Johannes' case, it's 6 uniquely unhappy marriages to a slew of conventionally attractive male stereotypes. Would you blame me for such a lengthy review throbbing with spoilers?

Introducing the stereotypes. Edwin Rodriques (Neil Nitin Mukesh), the prosthetic-limbed Army Major. The rockstar who goes by the unlikely name of Jimmy Stetson (John Abraham). The sensitive poet Musafir, also known as Wasiullah Khan (Irrfan Khan). The suave foreigner, Nicolai Vronsky (Aleksandr Dyachenko). Inspector Keemat Lal (Annu Kapoor) who is the only husband she was never in love with - a nice wordplay there on his name. The self-assured mushroom-researching Dr. Madhusudan Tarafdar (Nasseruddin Shah) who rescues her from an attempt to end her life.

We see Susanna (Priyanka Chopra) through the protagonist Arun's eyes. He meets her as a little boy working for her estate. Susanna ensures he gets an education and also sends him to medical school in Russia. Arun is the witness to her life and loves her in his own way. 

Susanna is helplessly flawed. As the narrator says, ever since her father died, Susanna has been trying to find him in every man she weds. Susanna is hardly the enchantress - it is she who is easily enamoured, in love with the idea of happily-ever-after. And she is also unforgiving to the core. 

Soon after the murder of Husband 3, just as you begin to wonder yourself, Arun asks why Susanna Saheb had to go and kill this one? Why not just walk away? One of Susanna's loyals replies, "When Little Susanna walked to school, she usually took the same route. One day she chanced upon a scary mad dog. Instead of taking the safer route to school, she took her dad's gun along and shot the dog. That's who she is - she doesn't change her route, she just blows the dog's brains out." The timing of that question is impeccable in this fairy-tale gone bad 6 times over. But I wish, I wish, I wish it had better crafted dialogue than the lame explanation that sounds perfectly plausible coming from a loyal.

Were their crimes so big that she had to kill them all? Even with the worst of them, she could have walked away. But Susanna is a jerk-magnet. And she's a woman who can't handle heartbreak and betrayal. She tries to avoid it by changing herself a little to please each of her men. She offers up Susie to match Jimmy Stetson's rockstar persona. She converts to Islam for Wasiullah Khan, becoming his Sultana. She is Anna (Karenina) to Nikolai (Vronsky). When Inspector Keemat Lal finally progresses from 'Madame' to 'Sunaina', she doesn't correct him. But when she is heartbroken - God help the men - she becomes the girl who blew the dog's brains out.

We see Susanna change over the years, dying a little with every heartbreak, transforming from the pert young girl married to an Army Major to the older woman who has finally embraced her greys (even made them fashionable), but stubbornly insists on viewing love through Susanna-tinted sunglasses. 

Goonga (Harish Khanna), Maggie Aunty (Usha Uthup) and the manager (who doesn't get named in the website) form the loyal troika who help Susanna deal with the messy business of death, with Arun being sometimes an amused participant.

Genre-wise, for the most part, drama. During the Susanna(Sultana)-Wasiullah marriage scenes, there were shocked gasps from the audience. As symbolisms go, this marriage could have only been set in Kashmir. Seen through Arun's eyes, it's a coming-of-age romance. But the movie turns darkly comical when all pretence of normality is dropped and Susanna's loyals chillingly narrate to a now-endangered Nicolai, how they helped kill each of the previous husbands. It turns into a comedy in the Keemat Lal portions. When Susanna marries Keemat Lal in a church - he self-consciously reads his vows from a paper, while she spouts them effortlessly from memory, with just a tiny self-effacing pause when she gets to 'till death do us part'.

There's a host of symbols in the movie. The Crucifix and the church,recur. Obviously. Could the 7 husbands perhaps also point in the direction of the 7 deadly sins? Priyanka Chopra renders Susanna as a feline presence with ferocity to match. There's Wasiullah's Persian cat, a rare, beautiful and precious pet, much like Susanna, that neatly steps off his snow-covered grave and walks away. When Susanna makes an advance on the now-grown-up Arun, saying he owes her for his education, he notices a spider (symbolic of perhaps entrapment in Susanna's life?), squashes it with the gift he has brought with him, and scoops it away in the gift wrap, thereby revealing the gift itself - a copy of Bluebeard's Seven Wives.

Bharadwaj's prowess is brevity. One of the methods he employs is working on a back-story  for each character, which doesn't feature in the final cut. The character, however, carries the baggage of his past. 'Kaminey' was a masterpiece in this technique (whatever it is the movie pundits call it - I've written about it here). Even in this movie, Susanna's story begins as a married woman and Bharadwaj doesn't dwell on the successive romances. But completely, utterly, needless was a depiction of Arun's marital life which could well have been suggested rather than shown. Was it shown because it was the sole happy union in a movie full of unhappy ones? Or was it a case of talented actress willing to play the part of Arun's wife?

 

Vivaan Shah is a fantastic find (Nasseeruddin Shah's younger son), but he doesn't wear the premature greying too well. The actors playing the husbands do their jobs well enough, even if the roles are too small. Usha Uthup - where have you been all these days? I hope the gracious lady with the diabolic voice gets more roles to bite into after this one.

Priyanka Chopra is clearly Bharadwaj's muse, but as the character ages, she is 'Priyanka Chopra playing tormented,' rather than 'tormented Susanna'. There's a great deal of realism in this movie, which Chopra tries to, but is unable to carry off, without the help of an ample-sized body-double in some scenes. I wonder if Bharadwaj could have picked someone else to play the role, someone less of a 'star' who is able to 'age' better. Regional cinema, especially Malayalam would have done a fine job of it, although Bharadwaj's symbolism would have lost out to stark realism with long silences and the occasional violin solo featured on a more believable Susanna and her 7 husbands.  

Oh, the 7th husband? Go watch. 

Interesting cameo, that. 

Enough said.

(pics courtesy 7 Khoon Maaf's official website)