It's been a rough week for Bollywood. Irrfan Khan, one of India's best actors, a man who effortlessly slipped between boundaries, from character roles to lead roles, from arthouse cinema to popular blockbusters, and even from Bollywood to Hollywood, died suddenly. The very next day, beloved Bollywood fixture Rishi Kapoor died as well. Kapoor started is career as a fresh-faced romantic lead, but his acting career really blossomed when he grew older and moved to character roles. It's like the industry lost its favorite quirky uncle and its jolly grandfather the same week.
Khan and Kapoor did one movie together, D-Day (2013.) It's billed as an action thriller, but it's very much an actor's movie, giving both men plenty of scope to display their talents. The usually affable Kapoor plays Goldman, India's most wanted, responsible for several terror attacks on Indian soil. Goldman is quick to point out that this isn't a matter of ideology for him; he's not a terrorist, he's a don. He only kills people because the money's good.
Goldman is currently hiding out in Pakistan under the watchful eye of the ISI, but he's determined to attend his son's wedding, and that gives Indian intelligence an opening. RAW chief Ashwini (Nassar) assembles a team of four deniable agents to bring him back alive. The team includes petty criminal Aslam (Aakash Dahiya), explosives expert Zoya (Huma Qureshi), brutal mercenary Rudra (Arjun Rampal) and Wali Khan (Irrfan Khan), an agent who has spent nine years undercover as a barber in Karachi, and is now married to Nafisa (Shriswara), with a son (Dwij Handa.) Rudra is qhuick to criticize Wali for his family entanglements but that doesn't stop him from drifting into a relationship with a local prostitute (Shruti Haasan).
Plans are made. Wali arranges for his wife and son to fly to London, then burns dowwn his own house to cover his tracks, and then the quartet spring into action. It's a good plan, and almost nothing could go wrong, but it's April 14, 2010, and nobody counted on a volcano erupting in Iceland and completely disrupting air travel to and from Europe. Wali's wife and child are not safe, and everything quickly spirals out of control.
This is probably the most somber spy movie I've ever seen. Nobody's really happy; Wali is racked with guilt over his double life, Zoya is quarreling by phone with her husband (Rajkummar rao), Rudra has stumbled into human emotion for the first time in years . . . even Goldman is bored and anxious. I suppose the wedding singer (Rajpal Yadav in a cameo) is having a good time. The action scenes are brutal and quick rather than flashy, the technology used is completely plausible, and the agency really is willing to disavow all knowledge of their agents.
In the end, though, this is an actor's movie, and the acting is good! I've been a bit hard on some of Arjun Rampal's performances in the past (the phrase "entirely made of wood" may have been involved) but I have to admit that Rampal is very good here. Rudra needs to silently smolder while trying to keep emotion at arms length, and Rampal smolders well. Rishi Kapoor is cast against type here; he's usually cast as the lovable but wise father figure, while Goldman is a monster. he's jolly, but the smile never quite reaches his eyes. And Irrfan Khan is really good as a man torn between his family and his country and constantly on the verge of losing everything. Bollywood tends to default to big: big action, big dance numbers, big displays of emotion. Irrfan Khan was a master of small, able to convey tremendous feeling with a glance or a gesture.
Irrfan Khan and Rishi Kapoor were both prolific actors, and I've seen only a fraction of their respective bodies of work; I'll be enjoying their performances for years to come. Still, the industry is diminished by their passing. They will be missed.
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