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No Smoking : Movie Review
26th Oct 2007 21.03 IST
By N. K. Deoshi

Watching Anurag Kashyap’s latest film No Smoking is like having a bizarre and absurd dream.

Being unconventional doesn’t mean being absurd. And thinking out of the box doesn’t mean throwing logic to the winds. Anurag Kashyap does just that, and more, in ‘No Smoking’.

In his bid to be different, to be “artistic”, to break the set parameters, and to rebelliously defy all that is stereotypical, Kashyap goes over the top. He has made a film, which, frankly speaking, is hard to understand. There is no logical progression in the story. The plot keeps flitting from one situation to another – some amusing, some ludicrous.

The bizarre storyline is perplexing, confusing and tiring. If you get deeply involved in the film (which is highly unlikely) you would find your mental faculties derailing after a while. So in a way, Kashyap does manage to take a poke at you with his absurd movie.

K ( John Abraham ) emerges from a dream in his bathtub. It is a dream that haunts him. He is in Siberia dying to smoke a cigarette. But Russian soldiers, keeping him housebound, won’t let him do that. And they don’t mind putting a bullet into K to stop him from smoking.

Thankfully it’s only a dream, albeit a bad one.

In his plush apartment, K stands in front of a mirror, lights his cigarette, puts on his goggles and admires himself. He turns a deaf ear to his wife Anjali ( Ayesha Takia ) who is sick of his smoking habit. “No one tells me what to do,” he utters to himself in the mirror with a look of vanity in his eyes.

K is a compulsive smoker. So are his friends. Except Abbas ( Ranvir Shorey ) who has kicked the habit, but after paying a great cost. He wears a hearing aid in his ears and glove on his hand. But there is a way he can get back what he has lost.

Abbas tells K about Baba Bengali ( Paresh Rawal ) who runs a pryogshala that guarantees to rehabilitate the smoking addicts. After much pestering from his wife, K visits Baba’s pryogshala in the squalid interiors of a slum. It is a visit that turns K’s life around.

He is forced to enter into a pact according to which he will turn deaf if he smokes his first cigarette. If he smokes second cigarette, K’s asthmatic brother will be put in a gas chamber filled with smoke. If he smokes the third one, his fingers will be chopped off. If he smokes again, he would lose his wife forever.

How K’s life spirals into an inevitable doom after this pact is what the remaining film is about. By the time the movie ends, it is hard to ascertain what is K’s dream and what is reality.

‘No Smoking’ is a lame attempt at noir cinema. The movie, for the most part, has a surreal look. Sadly, the story makes no sense. Some of the sequences are truly over one’s head.

For instance, K’s wife is killed after he is forced to smoke a cigar. He is arrested by cops and put behind bars only to wake up in his bed with his wife sleeping alongside. Later, while running away from a Russian soldier in Siberia, K dives into snow, enters into water and emerges through a tunnel into the netherworld of Baba’s pryogshala. But there, K sees his own self on the other side of a glass. “That is your body,” K is told by another inmate. Then this “spirit” or antar atma of K takes a smoke bath like the Jews who were put in gas chambers by Hitler in the portions of ‘Schindler’s List’ shown early in ‘No Smoking’.

The trouble with ‘No Smoking’ is that it rests on a concept that Anurag has stretched beyond its snapping point.

John Abraham manages his part well, but there are portions in the first half when his expressions are bland. Ayesha Takia has a marginal role, playing John’s wife who turns into his sexy secretary Annie in the office. Paresh Rawal is simply brilliant in his performance.

There are only two positive things about ‘No Smoking’. Its technical finesse and its background score. Rajiv Ravi’s cinematography is stunning. Vishal Bharadwaj’s score is captivating.

But all in all, ‘No Smoking’ is a big disappointment.

By the end of the film, I was tired, spent, and felt like having a smoke.

Rating: *

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No Smoking
Anurag Kashyap
John Abraham
Ayesha Takia
Ranvir Shorey
Paresh Rawal