14 September,2024 07:04 AM IST | Mumbai | Mayank Shekhar
A still from The Buckingham Murders
The Buckingham Murders is probably the first Indian film with a full-line explanation in the language column of its censor certificate!
And, indeed, a new language selection, Hinglish, as separate from Hindi, on BookMyShow, the ticketing app. Meaning, this is a movie that's primarily in English, with a smattering of Hindi, since everyone must know.
Also, meaning, if I'm not mistaken, this is the first English language production for lead actor Kareena Kapoor Khan. Over about two and half decades in Bollywood, she has largely embodied the super-sanitised, mainstream heroine's role.
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So much so that it feels sweetly strange to watch her casually slip in the throwaway f-word - once even to her father on this screen!
Kareena's presence apart, The Buckingham Murders is entirely what one could describe as a British murder-mystery. Although specifically set among Brits of desi origin in England. As a race, they get identified as âBritish Asians'.
Wherein two Brit Asian cops (including Kareena's character) lead an investigation into the case of a missing boy, from a Punjabi/Sikh family.
A statistic I learnt about missing kids is that 70 per cent of the times, they're either found dead, or don't return at all. The key is to find them within 12 hours.
You know this film's title. It's hardly a national secret then that the missing kid will be murdered. Although Buckingham in the movie's name has nothing to with London's royal palace - everything to do with Buckinghamshire County, where the murder and the movie is supposedly set.
As in a thoroughly gloomy, small-town called High Wycombe - where, apparently, everybody knows everybody - while a female cop, dealing with her own demons/depression, follows crimes involving young, missing/dead one.
Who ordered in this movie? My educated guess is Kareena herself - after watching the brilliant Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown (2021), similarly in a sleepy kasbah, off the American East Coast!
Which was so much a show about people, who've been through stuff, including the female lead (cop), while the murder/mystery is simply the side-dish that never leaves the table.
I'm just not sure Kareena fits into this adopted new town, the way Kate did with Mare in Easttown. And I don't just mean this for lack of the basic twang/accent that sets Kareena apart from the British colleagues in the cop force, let alone the other subjects/suspects.
She does get internal, with the performance, like Kate - dealing, in this case, with the freak murder of her own child. Somehow, you aren't hit by her grief, in the same way. Or her character, for that matter.
I suspect this has something to do with how the movie dully deals with so many themes, simultaneously - drug abuse, domestic abuse, adultery, adoption, communal strife, same-sex relationship taboosâ¦
After some point, you neither care for the crime nor the characters - forget them establishing any relationship with each other (the audience comes only much later).
The story is credited to Aseem Arora (Vedaa, Ek Villain Returns, Malang, etc). It's co-produced by Kareena, along with Ektaa R Kapoor, among others. Directed by Hansal Mehta, who films and edits content at a higher rate than you can consume.
I'd barely finished catching his series Lootere, right on the back of Scam 2003, post the show, Scoop, and Chhalaang (film), that he's delivered this theatrical release, while on the verge of wrapping an ambitious biographical series on Mahatma Gandhi, simultaneously creating Scam 2010, if not a whole lot else! Pouf.
There is fair mention of COVID in The Buckingham Murders. It's a subject, you may have noticed, that nobody brings up in regular conversations, these days. As if that virus never existed.
My sense is this picture got planned during the pandemic, when the Queen was alive, because she appears in a dialogue as well. Why pick the UK, though?
You could ask the business heads that. Brits offer astounding subsidies, and cash-back, if you shoot in their locations, including local crew/talents.
But this picture opens rather promisingly - offering you lay of the land, once set smartly post the Leicester Riots, with religious tensions, after cricket matches, concerning the Indian sub-continent.
Apparently, such fracas has become quite a common phenomenon within the British Asian community in the UK. Given the rise of religious fanatics. Especially among the brainwashed young.
Also, it takes special level of guts to film in English, when your lead is a bona fide Bollywood star. It adds to the authenticity, of course.
Makes you all the more admire Kareena's choices, lately; never mind the outcomes (Crew, Jaane Jaan, Laal Singh Chaddha). The Buckingham Murders certainly adds to her resumé.
Beyond that, it makes it to the sub-genre of Indian movies that draw you in, but leave you dry. As in the long listicle of pictures suffering from schizophrenia between their two halves.
Ones where you simply switch off, once the novelty of the world has worn off, and some yarn or the other meanderingly takes over. I nearly slept off in the second half. I know it was 12.45 am, but that's not the point.
