A repressed wife, an abusive husband, an aspiring actress, an illegal immigrant and a pizza delivery-boy: these are the five main characters in Anshuman Jha’s Hitchcockian twisty tale of long-suppressed desires and urgent manifestations of inter-personal needs.
Lord Curzon Ki Haveli is no spiritual cousin to Govind Nihalani’s Rukmavati Ki Haveli, which came a good 50 years ago. Nothing has changed, though. Women, in short dresses, are still considered of loose morals and wives are still treated as vassals by toxic men. Never mind if the location has shifted to London.
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When we meet the free-spirited wife Ira (Rasika Duggal, doing an effusive aftershock version of Jaya Bhaduri), she is being emotionally lobotomised by her stiff-upper-lipped desi-Brit husband Basuki (Paresh Pahuja, excellent).
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The couple is on the way to meet friends and Basuki is clearly not in the mood. From this early set-up, Anshuman Jha moves into a chamber piece where a massive cabinet in the living room plays an important part.
Ira and Basuki’s hosts are Saniya (Zoha Rahman) and Rohit (Arjun Mathur), a rakish charlatan. From the beginning, we sense something amiss in the set-up, some missing pieces in the jigsaw, characters trying to convey emotions contrary to what they actually feel… Jha is adept at intimate insinuations, hushed whispers, suppressed giggles and scattered ominousness. His directorial debut swims in the tides of the unspoken.
Not that there is any scarcity of conversation among the quartet of guests (plus one) thrown together in a British mansion. But this is a play-on-screen where what is not said is of more vital importance than what is.
Bikas Ranjan Mishra's writing is notably sharp even when the characters are so hazy in their yearnings. The frisson and the conflict among the characters are underlined by dollops of irony, like an ice cream cone with extra topping. There is an entire sequence of Rohit ordering different flavours of pizza (why are the hosts offering takeaway food to their guests, we eventually get to know). The sequence runs on for quite a while prompting a questioning spree in the audiences’ minds: what really matters for these drifters who are thrown together for one evening?
Rasika Duggal’s Ira, though outwardly a doormat, emerges as the strongest character as the narrative progresses. She is Hitchcockian in the truest sense: unpredictable, mysterious, chatty, violent…As her bullying husband, Paresh Pahuja is pitch-perfect.
While the conversations are often witty and pithy, the wordplay sometimes gets in the way: the double meaning attached to the word ‘asphyxiation’ or the pun in the line, “England is a very FAIR country.”
Not very fair, considering the fact that equal opportunities are available to all races in the United Kingdom.
“How many brown skinned actors do you see in British films?” the struggling actress Sanya asks.
Quite a few, actually, but the one white-skinned character in Lord Curzon Ki Haveli is not treated too respectfully.
What works are the unspoken conflicts between an unfulfilled wife and a satiated girlfriend, a prudish doctor and a free-spirited stowaway, all tied together with Beethoven playing indiscriminately in the background.