‘Berlin’ movie review: Aparshakti Khurana and Ishwak Singh become the voice of dissent in this subversive espionage thriller

A still from ‘Berlin’ 

Set in the Delhi winter of 1993 when the Iron Curtain had just lifted over Europe after years of Cold War, Berlin takes us to the period when India was still under Soviet influence in more ways than one. The American dream was looked at with suspicion. It was still cool to be called a socialist and liberalisation had yet to find its footing. The times when mobile libraries sold Alexander Pushkin’s poetry, Delhi’s Russian Culture Centre was a hub of cultural activity, and cryogenic engines and Scud missiles were part of newspaper headlines have hardly been documented in popular culture.

Marked by unusual titles and internecine battles, in writer-director Atul Sabharwal’s films, one can listen to the solitude and struggle of consciousness. After Aurangzeb and Class of ‘83, he has once again painted a layered picture where the suffering and silences of the protagonists generate a heady psychological ferment without making a show of it. For a change, in a high-stakes espionage thriller, the make-believe feels like a lived experience.

Together with cinematographer Shree Namjoshi, Atul astutely recreates the atmosphere when spies were getting morphed into headless chickens. Ahead of the visit of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, there is hectic activity in the intelligence circuit. Ashok, a waiter at the Berlin Cafe — an adda for the exchange of classified information, situated somewhere in the arteries of Connaught Circus — is caught on charges of spying.

Deaf, mute, and an orphan, Ashok is a puzzle that both the Bureau and the Wing, the two intelligence agencies of the government, want to solve. His guile has cocked a snook at the trained and so-called able-bodied sleuths. The mandarins in the Bureau bring in a sign language teacher Pushkin Verma (Aparshakti Khurana) to access Ashok’s mind and interpret his obscure language for the sly and overbearing spymaster Sodhi (Rahul Bose). Once the game of question and answer gets going, Pushkin realises there is more to the case than what he has been briefed about. As Ashok speaks through Pushkin, words like patriotism and national pride start getting swapped with blackmail and honey trap much to the chagrin of Sodhi and his cohorts. It becomes increasingly difficult to decipher who is bartering classified information and who has compromised his conscience.

In sync with the glowering production design (Ashok Lokare and Sandeep Shelar) that becomes a character in the narrative, Berlin is brutal in its pursuit of truth. Eschewing the frills that we often associate with the genre in mainstream Hindi cinema, the narrative is constructed on subversion and meta moments. Like the Berlin Wall, the deaf and mute waiters keep the secrets of the agents intact on the information trading floor of the cafe.

After a point, the mute Ashok becomes the voice of the truth that Pushkin is desperate to save, but Sodhi is resolute on twisting it to serve the vested interests. For Sodhi, truth is what is recorded, signed off, and archived. The line touches a raw nerve for it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep one’s voice truthful and uncorrupted.

After Jubilee, Aparshakti once again shows that he is not a one-trick pony who only performs to comic beats. Ishwak catches the eye with his talkative pupils. Atul ensures there is a subtle but distinct difference between the sign language used by Pushkin and Ashok, while Rahul is menacing as the mean officer keen only on saving his skin.

The Brutalist architecture that dots the government buildings of Central Delhi forms a bleak backdrop and together with the cold colour palette complements the dour tone of the story. The angularity of the iconic Parikrama Tower feels ominous. Like the exposed concrete, the film is bereft of any glassy patch. A quotidian but perhaps the most shining symbol of subversion is the shoe cleaning machine, which perhaps found its way from Atul’s insightful documentary on Agra’s shoe industry, to signify the desperation of removing the dirt and sprucing up the image.

Berlin is currently streaming on ZEE5