The infamous 1959 Nanavati case had spawned a couple of early films, neither of which came close to the lurid excitement of the real- life incident which involved a handsome naval officer, his lovely-but-lonely wife, and her lover, and a sensational murder.
And yet both Yeh Raaste Hain Pyar Ke and Achanak bear a stronger allegiance to the Nanavati case than Akshay Kumar’s Rustom, which borrows the core idea, and then adds a layer of extra intrigue. The idea may have been to spice up an already spicy plot, but the result is dilution, and it doesn’t work in the favour of the film.
It also doesn’t help that the film is fashioned like it is the unpacking the Nanavati Case For Dummies. Each scene is explicatory, with characters talking about what they are seeing, what they are doing, and what they are about to do. Each character is given dialogues to deliver: we know it is a ‘period’ film because the sets, the costumes and the locations scream attention(several look computer-generated), and the characters are made to declaim, not speak.
The treatment leaches all complexity from the film. It lies supine on the screen, flattened further by the way the characters come and go: Rustom Pavri(Akshay Kumar) as the naval officer-cum-cuckold, his straying wife Cynthia(Ileana D’Cruz), the other guy Vikarm Makhija(Arjan Bajwa), his ultra-glamorous, vengeful sister(Esha Gupta), chief investigating officer Lobo(Pavan Malhotra), eager beaver newspaper man Billimoria(Kumud Mishra): they interact with each other in a stiff rehearsed manner, and by the second half, when the film shifts to the fight in the court, and turns into a procedural, it becomes flat-out dull.
There is not a single frisson of excitement or fear or real emotion: How could the filmmakers have turned a crime of such high passion into such a dreary piece of work?
The woman who errs is handed out extenuating circumstances. Her husband hurt her, so she wanted to get back at him: yes, she felt abandoned but why couldn’t she just plain and simple be attracted to another man? That’s what led to the affair in the first place. It happened at a time when no one spoke aloud of such things: why is Rustom, made in 2016, so chary of showing a desirous woman? It makes D’Cruz a too-flushed, badly-made-up teary bundle, instead of a woman, craving attention and basking in it, as her right. And Gupta comes off an over-painted, over-coiffed, slit-eyed harpy.
