The sound of silence

Pushpaka Vimana (1987) isn't exactly a silent movie; there's sound, and sometimes that sound is important, but there isn't any dialogue.  Kamal Haasan plays an unemployed (and unnamed) educated young man who goes through life in the big city without much money.  Really, it's a series of incidents; he looks for a job, meets a pretty girl (Amala Akkineni) while window shopping, and struggles to get a turn in the communal bathroom.  It feels like a socially conscious episode of Mr. Bean, at least until the assassin shows up.

I should back up.  One night the young man (and I'm just going to call him Kamal from now on) stumbles across an unconscious drunken millionaire (Sameer Khakhar) who happens to have a key for room 3039 of the ultra fancy Hotel Pushpak.  And in a moment of madness, Kamal kidnaps him, ties him up and leaves him in his own dingy flat, then takes the key and goes to stay at the fancy hotel for a few days.

Suddenly Kamal has (somebody else's) money, a nice place to live, and a chance to see the girl from the shop again, since she's also staying at the hotel with her magician father (K. S. Ramesh) and doting and overprotective mother (Farida Jalal).  And he has a new problem, since someone has hired an assassin (Tinnu Anand) to kill the man in room 3039.

I know I joked about Mr. Bean earlier, but if Mr. Bean were to be menaced by a hired assassin, this would be the guy.  He's fussy, clumsy, and absolutely determined to make "killed with a knife made of ice" happen.  He's so determined, in fact, that he keeps an insulated thermos with an ice dagger with him at all times, even though he'd be better off just hitting Kamal with the thermos.

And once the assassin shows up, Kamal . . . continues to stumble from incident to incident, subjected to some combination of slapstick, pathos, and/or cringe comedy.  Valuable life lessons are occasionally learned, and the end result is interesting, sometimes compelling, but blooming hard to review.