Why oh why did I commit to two new reviews in one day? This was a terrible plan! And I am worried that both reviews will end up being shortchanged.

This is a movie that isn’t really like any other. It’s not that it is female lead, it is everything else, the twisted plot, the strong sense of setting, the wide cast of characters that each feel individual. It’s unique in all those ways and probably will never be replicated. Which makes it very hard to review! Because its not like I can compare it with something else, or put it in context of a history of films of this style. There’s just the one! This is it!

After this film there was Kahaani 2 and Badla from the same director, and Vidya went on to star in other movies as a lead. But, it’s not the same. Something about the combination of this endlessly likable actress and a director who builds a film like a puzzle was just impossible to recreate.

It’s not just that Vidya elevated her role, I think she also changed the way the film felt. Badla is cold, the camera takes a step back and watches what is happening. But Kahaani is as warm as Vidya’s smile. It becomes not a story of trickery and conning, but of love and sympathy.

That’s what makes this film truly remarkable. It’s a classic noir in structure, similar to everything from Howrah Bridge to Khiladi. The audience has to scrabble and guess, doesn’t know everything, follows behind our protagonist who is getting drawn ever further into this mysterious city. But in this case, our protagonist is a young pregnant woman who smiles and charms all who she meets. It isn’t a city of danger and secrets, because she disarms folks into revealing all their secrets. It is merely a city of friends she hasn’t met yet. This is the warmest happiest sweetest film you could make about a dangerous investigation in a dangerous city full of assassins and curropt or heartless government agents.

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There are two ways to see this film, and it works equally well in both ways. The first is as it is presented, Vidya is a young pregnant woman, a computer programmer who is married to another programmer, who has come to Calcutta searching for her husband. She goes immediately to the police station where she patiently explains to the police officers that her husband hasn’t returned her calls for two weeks. She gains the assistance of an eager young officer Parambrata Chatterjee and goes to stay at the hotel where her husband stayed. Everyone denies that her husband was there, and denies that he worked at the national data center where she knows he was. But at the NDC, the HR woman she speaks with recognizes the face in her husband’s photograph as another employee with a different name. The HR woman is killed by an assassin before she can say any more. Vidya drags Parambrata to search through the old HR files and find a photo and address for this other employee, she is now sure that her husband is involved somehow, he was mistaken for this other man who looks like him. Nawazuddin Siddiqui, an officer of the central intelligence agency for India comes to town and talks to Vidya and Parambrata and warns them away, but Vidya refuses to give up. She and Parambrata break into the office of a supervisor at NDC and hack his computer, but are caught. They are chased through the street by the corrupt supervisor, caught in a fight, and Vidya shoots him. Nawazuddin now doesn’t want them to stop, he wants Vidya to break into the computer again and get more evidence, and then use it to arrange a meeting with the mysterious man who looks like her husband. Parambrata is reluctant but Vidya agrees. At the last minute Parambrata realizes that Nawazuddin set Vidya up, he expects her to be killed at the meeting but at least they will be able to find the man after he kills her.

This is a really good film. Our innocent young woman, an outsider from London, approaches Calcutta with hope and openness. She finds information no one else could because she has fresh eyes and disarms folks with her charm. And there is a larger statement about the personal versus the general, Vidya cares about her husband and nothing else, not the big questions. Nawazuddin cares about the big picture and doesn’t care what he does to achieve his ends. Parambrata is torn between the two, should be follow his heart and help sweet Vidya, or follow his mind and help Nawazuddin with the big picture?

There is also a greater theme of female versus male power. The whole plot takes place during the lead up to the Durga Puja. Vidya is heavily pregnant, barely able to move. She is vulnerable and cannot physically defend herself. But at the same time, she is immensely powerful. Parambrata quickly becomes putty in her hands, as do most men. Not because she is sexy and beautiful, but because she is the embodiment of all the female powers. She is a mother, she is a woman to love, she is a woman to be protected, she is everything at once. I could write endlessly about the themes of female versus male, nation versus personal, even London versus Calcutta. But of course, that is just one version of the movie.

The other version is what we can look back and see after we watch the ending. Parambrata rushes to save Vidya and we the audience are also worried about her, worried about what she has unknowingly walked in to with her trust and love. And then we see her meet this terrifying man and he attacks her immediately, kicks her in the stomach, harms her pregnant stomach and the source of her power. Only for Vidya’s face to change as she rips out the fake pregnant stomach and uses it to knock away the gun. Then pulls the posts from her hair and stabs his foot and neck. And finally grabs the gun and expertly loads it, and shoots him as he walks away. Before disappearing into the crowd of similarly dressed woman following the Durga Puja. In the epilogue, we see that the man who trained the Big Bad, the government man who unwittingly gave his student tools to hurt others, had trained Vidya. Her husband was not some simple computer engineer, but another government agent killed by the Big Bad.

Now, what does this mean for the rest of the film? Vidya’s performance has a delightful lightness to it which reads like a woman who is so cheerful and happy she cannot imagine fear. But it is also the performance of a woman who has already lost so much and endured so much that there is nothing left for her to fear. Everyone is disarmed by her natural charm, and I still think it is her natural charm, but she is being used as a tool, using herself as a tool. She knows she is charming, she knows she is a pleasant young woman. And so she is using that to distract people, get them to open up, get them to reveal things they would not say to an official formal investigator. This impenetrable mystery that no one could solve, she can solve it because she is coming at it sideways instead of head on.

At the same time there is a strange sense of melancholy to her performance. Strange because it appears at times that make no sense to the viewer at the moment. Someone casually remarks that she will be a good mother and she suddenly looks into the camera with pain. Why? She is pregnant, this is surely the most innocuous and safe comment you can make. But when we learn she lost the baby after the shock of her husband’s death, then that sadness is explained. She mentions several times that her husband didn’t want to come to Calcutta, only came because she forced him and now she carries the weight of forcing him to come. Why should that bother her? She was sending him to do computer work for a few weeks, who cares? But when we know that she was sending her government agent husband on a dangerous mission that he did not want to take, than it makes sense.

The central idea of the film is in the title, “Kahaani”. Vidya created a story, a story she could tell and use with everyone around her. It’s a story that does not hold up, the audience and the people around her should be able to see through it easily. But we don’t because we want to believe. We want to believe this charming happy woman is just looking for her husband. We want to believe in an elaborate cover up rather than that she is simply lying. We want to believe there can be a happy ending.

And that is a good thing! Vidya’s mission works because she relies on the goodness of people, not the bad. She believes that a pregnant woman looking for her husband will be safe and helped and supported through out the city, and she is. She believes that appealing for help will get her father than the police trying to use fear to force information. And that is true too. And it works because even Vidya’s character wants it to be true, that is the melancholy we sense. She wants to believe she is still pregnant, her husband can still be found, her life has not yet been destroyed. The melancholy is the moments when she lets her reality bleed through, when the story disappears.