Somewhere high up in the rolling velvety hills above Vagamon a Rastafarian man lives with his pet dog, a rifle and a three screens of security cameras that tells him whenever a trespasser crosses over into his 30 acre farm.
The striking Naseeruddin Shah plays the solitude-loving farmer who secretly grows a powerful version of marijuana that he is days away from harvesting.
This arresting cinematic persona has a love in Bombay he is nostalgic about and a past involving some tribal woman from the North East.
The fearsome Colonel Naseer plays kills at least three different assassins expressly sent to kill him and buries them in his vast land after a languorous digging exercise with beer and dog for company. These dead men are expressly placed across India. Then, a Bihari drug pusher delivers a kidnapped girl from Bombay for safe-keeping with the Marijuana growing cowboy farmer.
These are the tantalizingly established core of a story Independent director Anup Kurian writes and directs. He then packs this premise with so many tentacles that deliberately go nowhere. That is creative ambition rarely seen on film.
While the languorousness of the rolling hills, the charming landscape captured in long Bullet rides cutting past elephants strolling along, is wrought well enough, the menace of the constantly at threat from "enemies I do not have" rebel farmer slips away.
Even the elements of the Colonel's hinted-at past, both romantic and troubling, tend to fizzle away because the Colonel comes across more as a leisurely hedonist rather than troubled man. Too many intriguing leads remain unexplained, for example the series of fake identification cards he stocks. These bits glint, but usually in natural light.
Perhaps, to establish a storytelling route of hints and possibilities, the cinematography should have benefitted if it worked a little more on setting moods cinematically. Most of the times, Naseer is voicing his moods, adding more daylight to mute the glints that the film hopes to ignite.
The film's mature, muted drama works brilliantly, especially in its unhurried and subtle humour, the verdant surroundings slowly take over this film. The dashingly original character misses engagement with any of the many dramatic possibilities that trespass into his life despite a loaded gun.
And yet this is a film one should not miss. None of the mainstream papers reviewed the film. It has had only a limited release. It showcases a new strand a little away from the Wasseypur and Ishqiya type of engagement with rural chic in glitzy, gimmicky urban dress. It focuses on urbane existence far from cities that is so self-assured it does not even acknowledge the city.
