Film Noir? No way

Badlapur is film noir gone horribly wrong. This is the genre where you have a motel in the vast, vacant outback, eagles hovering above, run by a balding, fat, older man whose wife is the young femme fatale in flowing slit silks, where our ruggedly good-looking hero, skin bronzed by being on the road, all washed-up and wise-cracking but with a dark melancholic past, the eternal Man With No Name, lands up and has a torrid affair with the alluring wife, who then plot to kill the philandering and abusive husband, break open the safe and make a run. Or where a gang of four, all good-for-nothing bums, hatch a hare-brained plan to rob the nearby bank, get away with the loot, meet a couple of slutty, smoldering ladies on the way, where everyone double and triple-crosses and finally ends up shooting one another. The last scene has to be a slow-mo sequence of the camera going over all four bodies (or six if you count the ladies) in pools of red syrupy blood. 

Or it has to have a multi-million drug deal, used greenbacks stacked in sacks hidden in AC vents of non-descript, dingy inns. It has to have a corrupt cop, preferably with a drinking problem and a glad-eye, going after our gangster hero who is planning to go good after this one last heist, his good girl believing his story. It has to have a hardboiled detective in a black mackintosh working out of a crummy office with a svelte secretary (whom he doesn't sleep with). It has to have our brooding detective tailing our gangster through cobbled streets on rain-drenched nights with a bright moon casting long shadows. It has to have smoky watering holes with wily bartenders and women in red heels on high stools wearing imitation pearls and smoking long cigarettes, with jazz in the back ground. 

It has to have Chandlerian chutzpah, Hammettisque drawl. You know, with film noir you are thinking Key Largo, the Postman Always Knocks Twice, the Maltese Falcon, Miller's Crossing, Reservoir Dogs. Maybe even No Country For Old Men — though it had the unconvincing last scene where the crazed and violent Javier Bardem, who doesn't spare anyone who has ever seen his face, lets the boys go who save him. You are maybe thinking the Chabrol films, or La Haine, or the Match Factory Girl, or the new-age Korean films. 

That's why Badlapur jars. You can't have a little boy dying brutally in a film like this. If at all, you hint at this in the troubled hero's secret past in subtle strokes. You can't have this mawkishly voyeuristic scene of a woman being forced to take her clothes off at scissors-point—it's as icky as the sequence between Raj Babbar and Padmini Kolhapure in Insaaf Ka Tarazu all those years ago (Also why, if the lady is faking an orgasm, does it matter if she is fully clothed or in her underwear?). You can't have this cringingly revolting scene of our hero molesting an unwilling girl, so what if she is a prostitute, to release his angst. The train going past our hero's den is fine, but tell me, which noir film has a mother? This genre is all about style, it's where women have oomph and men swagger, you don't take the characters too seriously, they are not meant to be real, they just do the stuff what you and I won't do and make a bloody mess of it all in the end. 

Sriram Raghavan, the avowed noir fanatic, got it right to an extent in the first half of Ek Hasina Thi and some parts of Johnny Gaddaar (and lost it completely in Agent Vinod) but Badlapur is a bad regression. The only bright spot is Nawazuddin Siddiqui but he too should watch it — too much of this underclass, small-time thief with an unshaven, sweaty face has the danger of filmmakers typecasting him like how they did, say, Gulshan Grover, the go-to guy for another trope of the 80s Bollywood. The rest of the casting is a disaster. Varun Dhawan as the seething, simmering vengeful hero is like casting Justin Bieber as Scarface. Or Huma Qureshi as the prostitute is like giving Sharon Stone's role in Basic Instinct to Emma Thompson. But these are specifics. Badlapur lacks the overall noir-cred, it just doesn't have noir soul, it is regular Bollywood fare masquerading as film noir.