This is a rare Hindi film that evokes the era of the Cold War, and the kind of spy universe created by John Le Carre, where secrets are exchanged in a café, called Berlin, that is at the centre of the area in Delhi that houses Intelligence Bureau offices and foreign embassies. Today, YRF’s spy universe requires muscled heroes and extravagant action, but the web of real spycraft is woven in small, dark spaces—hidden watering holes and bare interrogation rooms.
Café Berlin has another specialty—it has hearing-impaired wait staff, so that the secrets spilled at the tables are not picked up and sold/shared by the servers. In 1993, when Atul Sabharwal’s film is set, the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Cold War had ended, and spies might have been run of business, but America and Russia were still adversaries, with India leaning towards the latter. At a time like this, the Bureau (the not fully named Central Bureau of Investigation) headed by the sinister Jagdish Sondhi (Rahul Bose) gets wind of a plan to assassinate the Russian President on his visit to India.
Ashok (Ishwak Singh), a deaf-mute waiter from Berlin, is arrested for being a spy—Sondhi does not know for which agency—and needs to be interrogated. They could have given him the questions in writing, since he is literate, but then the film would lose its cinematic intrigue and miss out on the performance of Aparshakti Khurana as Pushkin Verma, a sign language teacher, ordered to report to the Bureau’s scary grey building and locked into a room with Ashok to get information out of him.
Pushkin—named after the Russian poet—finds that there is no escaping this unwanted assignment. The Bureau and its rival Wing (obviously Research And Analysis Wing) under the equally menacing Raman (Deepak Qazir Kejriwal) both threaten him and his family, snoop into his private life, and chase him down the street in cars with blinding headlights.
In spite of being watched like a hawk by Sondhi, Pushkin figures out there is something not quite right, the cheerful and cheeky Ashok is probably a fall guy in a plot he does not understand. He decides to do some snooping himself, even though he is out of his depth in the midst of all the cloak-and-dagger scheming around him, that involves a woman (Anupriya Goenka) and unscrupulous spies from both agencies.
Khurana and Singh are brilliant, their interactions being the pivot around which the film revolves. The men persecuting them are trained, but these two have the smarts to cope with the twists and turns they encounter in the pursuit of the truth, which, in that shadowy world, is malleable. (In a delightful scene, Ashok reveals that he learnt how to duplicate a key by taking its impression on a bar of soap from a film, Sadhu Aur Shaitan.)
Berlin, (on Zee5) with its convoluted plot, appropriately slow pace (edited by Irene Dhar Malik), muted colour palette (shot by Shreedutta Namjoshi) and unobtrusive music (K. Krishna Kumar) is actually enjoyable, for viewers who are aficionados of the espionage genre, and like their spy thriller, stirred not shaken.
Berlin
Directed by Atul Sabherwal
Cast: Aparshakti Khurana, Ishwak Singh, Rahul Bose, Anupriya Goenka, and Kabir Bedi.
On ZEE5
