Seven years, 47 scripts, an action film and a television series later, filmmaker Abhinay Deo returns to dark humour with this week’s release — Blackmail . “I have a count of it,” shares the Delhi Belly (2011) director, “Forty-seven scripts were read, and a majority were comedy. They were all trying to sell me something which was like Delhi Belly .” But he admits that none of them could compare to the quirky Imran Khan-starrer. With Parveez Shaikh’s script about a man named Dev who chooses to anonymously blackmail his wife’s lover in exchange for keeping their affair a secret, Deo knew it was time to make a comeback to the genre. “It was such an outstandingly different script!” he says about the upcoming film.
Between the two comedies, Deo directed and released two action thrillers — the Indian adaptation of the American television series, 24 (2013), and John Abraham’s Force 2 (2016). Deo’s foray into action, along with his earlier Game (2011), seemed like a natural choice for the director, considering he is self-admittedly obsessed with video games and its visuals. But one wonders if Blackmail marks Deo’s deliberate attempt to revisit dark comedies — a style that proved to be significantly more successful for him. Pat comes the reply: “I just have a very wicked sense of humour.”
What the director means is that he grew up orchestrating practical jokes on his friends and family. Between bouts of laughter, Deo fondly reminisces some of his choicest pranks from when he was younger. “One of my sisters had very long and beautiful hair,” the director shares, betraying where the story is headed. A 12-year-old Deo would often ask his cousin why she didn’t cut her hair short, and when she didn’t want to part with her long locks, he ended up forcing her to. “I stuck a [wad of] chewing gum right on top of her head,” he shares, before adding, “I never understood why everybody screamed at me later. It was just hair! It would grow back.”
Blackmail’s humour, like Deo’s, draws from a sadistic place. It lies in the ridiculousness of the series of events, and in the real possibility of chancing upon a situation like Dev’s — finding a cheating spouse. And while comparisons will be, and are being drawn to Delhi Belly , the film did not serve as a beginning for Blackmail . In fact, Deo shares that the germ of the idea came to Shaikh through the situation of some people around him — enhancing the absurdness of the film’s realm of truth.
The upcoming film will not just be Deo’s return to the genre, but it will also have faces we have not seen enough of. While Omi Vaidya, 3 Idiots ’ (2009) Chatur, ended his hiatus from Bollywood last year with the psychological thriller Mirror Game after Jodi Breakers (2012), actor Pradhuman Singh hasn’t truly ventured beyond what he’s best known for – his role as Osama Bin Laden’s lookalike in the Tere Bin Laden series. Singh also happens to be Blackmail’s dialogue writer, and it was his readings of its dialogue drafts that made Deo cast him in the film.
The cast includes Irrfan Khan, Kirti Kulhari, Arunoday Singh and Divya Dutta with Khan playing the protagonist, the middle-class cuckold Dev, and Kulhari playing his wife who’s having an affair. Though comedy is not new for the actor, picturing Khan usually conjures images of him in serious roles like in Maqbool (2003) or Paan Singh Tomar (2012). But for Deo, the actor’s performance as the honest and socially inept Monty in Anurag Basu’s Life in a Metro (2007) is what comes to mind. “His comic timing was so precise,” says Deo about Khan’s performance as Monty, “I needed a very inert kind of character who delivers comedy without doing too much.”
Before wrapping up, I hurriedly ask Deo about any recent pranks he might have pulled. “I think now I have to play a few things more responsibly,” he says solemnly before he chuckles adding, “now I teach all this to my son.”
