There is a bit of an enigma about Vishal Bhardwaj that seems to have rubbed off on his reimagination of Susanna Anna- Marie Johannes, or Priyanka Chopra’s character in 7 Khoon Maaf . In person, Vishal is a softspoken man, genial to the core. Yet his cinema always tries to shout out a fiery idiom, wantonly bursting with life’s joys and agonies, hopes and despairs, sobriety and humour.
Susanna in 7 Khoon Maaf aims at being a contradiction, too. She is basically a nice romantic girl, almost gullible — one who can unconditionally fall in love with a man just because she loves the poems he writes. But she is also imagined as a ruthless pragmatic.
She doesn’t hesitate to literally go for the kill if her man isn’t, well, as she wants him to be. That bit makes 7 Khoon Maaf an unusual film. With Vishal helming affairs, it gives you the minimum quality you went in expecting, too.
The trouble with the film perhaps lies in the fact that it is based on a short story — a very short one, actually. Ruskin Bond’s Susanna’s Seven Husbands spanned just a few pages. As Vishal tries to flesh out Bond’s tale into a fullfledged feature, the narrative becomes painfully stilted at times.
This is also a reason why the script, unconventional as it is, stops short of being a challenge worth killing for, for Priyanka. To give her the due, she lives it up with her role, as do most of the half- dozen husbands who serially fall prey on Susanna’s innovative kill trail (Irrfan Khan, Anu Kapoor and Aleksandr Dyachenko being the most impressive of the lot).
The cinematic revisit on Bond’s original story (done by Vishal and Matthew Robbins) starts off with a young Susanna falling in love with a dashing Major.
He is the alpha male, Susanna’s man of dreams. The problem: he is a bit too old for her, and he likes to give orders.
As Susanna husband- hops her way over a story that spans almost four decades, coldly disposing each man along the way because they strike as imperfect at some level, her reasons for killing them should have added an eccentric spin to the story. They don’t, because after a point the idea becomes too monotonous to sustain interest.
The moment she homes in on a man, you already know it’s a matter of a few scenes before she will dispose of the guy. That, even if you haven’t read Bond’s story.
Vishal’s bid at balancing black comedy and lyrical romance works to an extent. The sense of emptiness about Susanna is also never quite captured, as her quest for ideal love goes on. This should have been a killer thriller. It ends up managing to thrill only in fits.
Rating - 3 / 5
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