The genius of a crime or a caper lies in its simplicity, either in reel or real life. The tunneling away through the Shawshank prison with a little pickaxe by Dufresne, the (age old) feigning of sudden illness drama executed to perfection, many times over, by Charles Shobharaj to escape from prison (infirmary), the audacious jewelry heist posing as Income Tax officials by the Special 26 team, and the never failing pyramid schemes that people still continue to fall for, all allude to the simple fact that crime pays.... provided there are only a few moving parts. Consider this ingenious scheme of splitting up a couple from the telugu classic "Muthyala Muggu", hatched by a hired gun. After successfully planting a couple of false positives in the mind of the husband about his wife's fidelity, on the D-day, an unknown person is smuggled into the wife's bedroom to hide in a corner at bedtime, so that when the husband knocks at the door, the guy already in position, disrobed, answers the door and hurriedly slips away into the night knocking down the shocked husband in the process. No words are spoken, none are needed - the husband is convinced of his wife's crime and the wife too shocked of her husband's presumption writ large on his face. Simplicity saves the day yet again. But simplicity is not without peril and is sometimes caught up in its own web trying to be oversmart.
Another classic scene from charming "The Princess Bride" when the hero goes up against a super smart villain and instead of settling the scores like men, with weapons, they both sit down at a table, with two goblets in front, one of them poisoned. Whoever picks the wrong cup pays with his life, and the battle of wits begins. The oversmart villain tries to overthink the situation, overanalyze about which cup might be poisoned, and in the end, picks up a cup, drinks and dies...when it will be revealed in the end that both the cups have been poisoned and the hero simply had been building resistance to the poison all along. The mention of bank robbery brings to mind "Heat", with its elaborate shoot outs on the streets, in broad daylights, botched getaways, and overspinning tires tearing away at great speed. But the master of simple, yet effective, crime, Elmore Leonard, has a different thing in mind when it comes to bank robberies, and that is to observe the situation in the bank for a while, make sure the manager is talking with someone seriously, pick a bank teller, walk up to her with a winning smile and in a calm and a soothing tone tell her that he is a robber and unless the teller empties out her cash drawers in a small brown bag (no dye packs please, thank you very much), the man, his partner in crime sitting across her manager, is going to be shot between the eyes, and before the teller realizes, she had already packed the money in the bag and handed it over to the robber, who coolly collect it, wishes her a good day and walks away. No guns, no blood, no alarms, easiest withdrawal in history. All that crime calls for is a bit of observation and bit of ingenuity, and all parties can walk away unharmed.
Again, there's a difference between being simple and being stupid, and they are often confused with when it comes to crime thrillers/capers, and even more so when there is a comedic (dark or otherwise) undertone to them. The lure is so great, to quickly veer off into the farcical side of things instantly diluting whatever narrative tension has been built up till that point, that a majority of crime comedies have their wheels come undone before the end point approaches. The masters at this game, the Coen Brothers, have as many feathers in their caps holding on to taut narrative rope, as they have the splat marks on their faces letting premises run away, and none better to prove the (former) point than their debut feature - Blood Simple, which is about a jealous man hiring a private eye to off his wife and her lover. Though the story is pretty straightforward, tne narrative is drawn out with every tense moment dragged along the razor's edge, slowly and precisely, in a very Hitchcokian way. The suspense in such scenarios is more about how far can the moment be sustained, like a dead body being dragged along a corridor, with the loud squeaks and the creaks of the floor underneath, without anyone noticing, or how long can the cat and mouse game, between the wife and the PI, go on without one party blinking first, and the important of all, how long can the credulity of the premise hold on, before suspesion of disbelief kicks in. And the Coen Brothers prove beyond the shadow of any doubt that suspense is more nerve wracking when the underlying premise is real and the tension piles on it when the characters are written into a corner with absolutely no way out. It is usually here that less ambitious ones throw in the towel, summon their Deus Ex Machina and hurriedly find their way to exit. This is the point the separates the winners from the 'also ran'.
And 'Andha dhun' is a bonafide winner, on all counts, from its quirky setup, the commitment to its premise till the end frame, and its willingness to not find easy ways out of the wonderful/funny/tense scenarios it creates for its characters. Rare in Indian movies that a suspenseful movie is a hilarious one too, and the director shows the great discipline of not highlighting/underlining the hilarity at the expense of the tension, as he (correctly) realizes that the situation is a laugh riot because of its incredulity and not for anything else. The movies performs genre-hopping with the ease and expertise of a floor gymnast, from con to noir, and then to suspense, and on to comedy, and sometimes all of them within a matter of few minutes. It greatly helped that the budget was limited, to contain the scope and hone in on the heart of the moment without playing up any distractions or diversions. Revealing anything more would ruin the wonderful suprises that the movie has in store at almost every other bend. And it certainly wouldn't hurt to have multiple viewing either to catch all of the (meta)references and Easter eggs that were snuck in in almost every other scene. Isn't that what a con is, when every thing happens right in plain sight, and yet none seem to notice the glaringly obvious? Like a blind bat, or blind note...
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