No Smoking Starring: John Abraham,Ayesha Takia,Joy Fernandes,Paresh Rawal
Director: Anurag Kashyap
Music: Vishal Bharadwaj
The weirdest film of the week comes from India. No Smoking is an enjoyably barmy movie that plunders from everything from Cabaret to Cocteau’s Orphée. A young man signs a contract with an organisation which claims to have a 100 per cent success rate in curing smokers of their addiction and he’s swiftly plunged into a dream-like netherworld, a surreal approximation of his former life. It’s wildly uneven, but I rather admire this atmospheric little curio for its unconventional ambition.
Hindi film-makers attempting to refresh Bollywood generally do so at their peril. The old tried-and-tested formulas still work best.
Sympathy, then, for writer-director Anurag Kashyap whose fantasy thriller has John Abraham as a chain-smoking, self-regarding husband whose wife (Ayesha Takia) leaves him and who then resolves to give up the ciggies.
The only way to do it involves a mysterious guru who makes him sign a contract which virtually means first the removal of a finger and then worse if he touches the weed again.
The film swirls about frantically in the effort to entertain, has a terrible Bob Fosse-like dance sequence and generally overstays its welcome.
But Abraham is solidly impressive, the production values are good and at least Kashyap tries to eschew the usual Bollywood clichés.
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