.jpg)
Sujoy Ghosh has a blueprint for making a gritty thriller: a gripping storyline powered by a talented cast. But while this formula worked marvels for Kahaani, Jaane Jaan, an official adaptation of Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X, failed to hit the mark.
Some would argue that yet another Bollywood iteration of the famous Japanese crime novel, which formed the skeletal base of Jeethu Joseph’s Drishyam, wasn’t required in the first place. But Ghosh was probably betting on his carefully curated cast — Kareena Kapoor, Jaideep Ahlawat and Vijay Varma to do the heavy lifting. And while the actors certainly measure up to the task at hand — a welcome change to see Vijay Varma as the good guy for once — the narrative lags in places, and in others, fails to make the point entirely.
It’s only at the end of Jaane Jaan where things get interesting. There’s no who-dunnit business; by this point we already know who gets killed and who does the killing. There’s little empathy for the victim, a dirty, abusive cop Ajit (Saurabh Sachdeva), who his estranged wife Maya (Kapoor) and her 13-year-old daughter strangle to death with the cord of an electric heater. The mother-daughter are saved from their predicament by their reclusive neighbour, Teacher (Ahlawat). Karan, a charming Mumbai cop on the hunt for Ajit is thrown into the fray and in the midst of an extremely subdued love triangle, a murder is being covered up and investigated.
So the million-dollar question (for the audience)... is how long till Maya and her daughter get picked up by Karan and his team?
Never, if the Teacher has anything to say about it. Maya is Karan’s only suspect, but her multiple alibis for the day of the murder — 10th of that month — are airtight. Karan’s ready to throw in the sponge, take Maya (who he harbours a reluctant attraction to) off the suspect list and depart the misty climes of Kalimpong. But then a series of well-timed information forges a new possibility: someone was helping Maya. In an extremely dramatic sequence involving Dojo, Karan drops hints to Teacher that Maya has an accomplice and that he’s bent on arresting her.
Teacher acts quickly. He tells Maya that “he’ll take care of everything” and then in the very next scene, proceeds to “confess” to Karan that it was he who killed Ajit because the latter was distressing Maya. Teacher poses himself to be a crazed stalker, calling himself Maya’s “bodyguard” who listened in on her troubles through a crack in the wall and took it upon himself to relieve her of all her troubles. The way Ahlawat has been made up for the movie — ageing despite himself, a reclusive aura, a bald patch he's determined to cover up and an almost fanatical obsession with maths — makes it easy for him to sell his story. And then he describes, in chilling detail, how he murdered Ajit.
Except… plot twist! He wasn’t describing his killing of Ajit, even though it matched what the postmortem of Ajit’s body had revealed. What the police found wasn’t Ajit’s body to begin with. It was the charred remains of a homeless man he’d fattened up like a pig, and then butchered ruthlessly.
Teacher viewed life through the lens of maths, and the minute he got involved in Ajit’s murder, he knew that the police would someday link it back to Maya and her daughter. But that was if they found out that the murder took place on the 9th of the month, where Maya had no alibis. If the crime happened a day later, on the 10th, Maya and her daughter — who he’d sent to public places like the movie hall and karaoke bar where everyone would remember seeing them — would be off the hook. Teacher gave the homeless man Ajit’s coat, took him to the hotel Ajit was staying in and took care of his upkeep long enough for the man to leave behind an important DNA sample — strands of hair. Once he had that, Teacher took the man to a secluded corner near a monastery, beat his face with a rock until it turned into an unrecognisable mush and burned the tips of his fingers to remove all traces of his identity. What he left behind on the charred corpse was Ajit’s coat and his police badge.
- Look Good6 best Rolex watches in the world
Even the nature of Teacher’s crime was borrowed from maths. Like he’d told Karan in an earlier segment, the P = NP problem is a happenstance in ordinary life as well. Someone shows you a solution to your problem and you jump on it, even though the truth is staring you right in the face. It was this formula that Teacher adhered to; he gave the unidentifiable homeless man the identity of Ajit, and the police lapped it up and followed through with an investigation that was very much predetermined by the mastermind himself. Through this, the movie comments on the flaky nature of human condition. Sometimes, it’s a lot simpler to just go along with the quick fix that someone else is offering, rather than putting in the work and resolving the mix-up yourself.
We have the how, now let’s tackle the why. The fact that Teacher was in love with Maya is touched upon from the very start of Jaane Jaan. However, he’s also indebted to her. On the day she first knocked on his door, he was going to hang himself for completing a 10-year-long equation 46 hours after someone else had already cracked it. Teacher believes Maya saved his life. So in a way, he throws over his moral compass for a mix of unrequited love (which Maya cleverly capitalises on) and gratefulness. And in a way, she is doing him a favour. In an earlier sequence, Teacher had told Karan that it would take him 15 years to solve a mind-boggling equation only if he could dedicate all his time to it. After being locked up, all he has is time to devote to his first love: maths.
