Nikkhil Advani’s sixth feature film, D-Day, was an accomplished work. It was a thriller about the enforced extradition of a Dawood-like gangster. But what we came away with was a haunting love story between a mysterious Indian intelligence agent and a Pakistani prostitute, both wounded and scarred for life. She in ways that we can see. He in intangible ways. But pain, at the end of the day, is pain. It’s what binds together the whore and the ex-army man.
Shot in an expertly constructed brothel set with the crowded colours of lurid sex suggesting the tragedy of lives lived in borrowed beds, the scenes between Arjun Rampal and Shruti Hassan are punctured by piercing silences and a haunting melody about love, loss and incomplete lives sung by Rekha Bharadwaj. The screenplay by Advani, Ritesh Shah and Suresh Nair constructs a collage of characters hell bent on a collision course. Though rigorously researched, the erudition sits easily, spontaneously and unobtrusively on Advani’s narration. The story of a bunch of RAW agents on a mission in Pakistan to nab “India’s Most Wanted” is told in a tone that favours a detached distance from the proceedings while ensuring we see each character’s life in prismatic close-ups.
Though a deeply patriotic film, D-Day indulges in no flag-waving. The Indian flag makes one guest appearance, and that too end. God bless Manoj Kumar.
Nikkhil Advani Speaks To Subhash K Jha On 12 Years Of D-Day:
He says, “Twelve years ago, I was allowed to live again thanks to this film and what it did to my career. D-Day changed everything for me. It liberated me as a filmmaker and storyteller. It allowed me to stop thinking about all things that were not at all important while telling a story and just concentrate on what was. Irrfan taught me that. He was such a towering figure as an actor, yet he never really took himself seriously. He took his character very seriously. Ironic that it was after D-Day that the world and the industry started taking me seriously. It was my second film with Rishi Kapoor and if he was alive he would have been so fascinated that a conversation that we both had one night of “breaking barriers as creative people” led to him playing Goldman and rocking it. While D Day is so special in more ways than one, it will always be bittersweet because of Irrfan and Rishiji’s passing away. I still smile thinking of the one scene they had in the farmhouse in the pre-climax.”
“Irrfan liked to go with the flow and was caging lines, and Rishiji, I think, after take 3 stopped him and said, ‘Boss, you may be this Oscar-winning actor, but yaar hum traditional hai… I need you to land on the damn cue!’ D Day was the best film I ever made. Possibly because no one had any expectations about it, and that’s why I like to, even today, put my head down and just let the work do the talking. POW, Airlift, Baazaar, Mumbai Diaries, Batla House, Rocket Boys, Mrs Chatterjee Versus Norway and Freedom At Midnight are all, I think, extensions of a comfort I felt because of D Day. I had a fatwa declared against me by the big man and had to have security for three years,” he adds.
