Berlin: Aparshakti Khurana, Ishwak Singh entice in Atul Sabharwal’s steady spy thriller

But the political reality in Berlin remains submerged in the fog that envelopes New Delhi and Sabharwal — who wrote the screenplay for Jubilee (2023) — announces right off the bat that his world is considerably small, microcosmic. In focus are not more than a handful of characters, including ‘Bureau’ officer Jagdish Sondhi (Rahul Bose), local school sign language tutor Pushkin Verma (Aparshakti Khurana) and the deaf-and-mute Ashok Kumar (Ishwak Singh), accused of being a spy for foreign intelligence. Ashok might be in cahoots with the enemy who wants to assassinate Yeltsin and jeopardize the bilateral relationships, leading to Sondhi hiring Pushkin to interrogate and interpret the spy with his sign-language skills. Pushkin is an ordinary teacher living alone in government quarters so the job is way ahead of pay grade. Maybe only he can crack Ashok, the boy who hides behind his simpatico? Or maybe Sondhi is using him (and Ashok) for something quite sinister? Moreover, what does Berlin have to do with all this?

A mood-piece with palpable sense of nostalgia

Much of the charm of Berlin lies in the interplay between these characters and how it deftly slides the truth into its original place. Sabharwal borrows the essence of the likes of John le Carré and Graham Greene in keeping the details largely unpronounced and ensures his chief players handhold the viewer into the depths of the story. Pushkin, played with solid control by Khurana, is posed with the conundrum of seeking facts on his own while also finding some wiggle room under the thumb of Sondhi and other Bureau brown-noses. As another entity in the form of the ‘Wing’ approaches him with another face of the truth, he finds himself at a crossroads and if he doesn’t act right, casualties are guaranteed.

Khurana’s great on-screen camaraderie with Ishwak Singh is enunciated by the effortless use of sign language. The two actors are said to have undergone months of training and gotten so skilled that they could improvise of their own accord, lending their jugalbandi a fine nuanced touch. Pushkin’s reason to master sign language in the first place is a deaf younger brother and it is possible that he sees Ashok the same way, as the loner that he is. The former is strictly advised to stick to the script offered by the Bureau but he sees that there’s lots more than meets the eye and his attempts to squeeze in a personal curiosity unearths more than he can imagine. And like any spy thriller worth its salt, Berlin allows its protagonist to piece things together to encounter truth.

Where Sabharwal’s craft shines bright is in the restraint and composure. Unlike most espionage exercises, the camera (cinematography by Shree Namjoshi) doesn’t operate restlessly but stays still on the characters who reveal tiny secrets through their grimaces, chides and other subtle physical signs. Rahul Bose’s ‘polished’ performance, as the potentially-compromised, high-ranked officer, has strong echoes of American and English cinema and Berlin never shies away from being a mood-piece that has some definite influences.

Sabharwal’s sense of nostalgia is palpable. He has stated in interviews that his growing-up years were marked by a huge cultural exchange between Russia and India when the Dostoevskys and Tolstoys were as popular here as the Mithun Chakrabortys and the Amitabh Bachchans were in the Soviet Union. For him, Berlin, which is revealed to be a coffee house specially meant for diplomats of various countries to coalesce and converse, becomes a hub of memory that also acts as a bridge between the past and the future. Even Pushkin, in the film, is said to have been named (by his father) after the Russian playwright and poet Alexander Pushkin.

Underestimates audience by overstating itself

The love for the era also shows in how he employs production designers Ashok Lokare and Sandeep Shekar. In presenting the topography or the physical makeup of the New Delhi of the 1990s, Sabharwal and his team limit their purview as everything is made to evoke a fear of confinement and paranoia in Pushkin, whose feverish attempts to learn the truth first-hand come with great perils attached. Irene Dhar Malik’s editing refrains from the rat-a-tat energy of modern spy thrillers and only cuts back and forth when required, particularly to highlight Ashok’s account of what and how everything unfolded.

The minor glitches in the film occur in the form of writing when the screenplay begins to play its hand prematurely. Certain characters, like the ‘Wing’ officer played by Deepak Qazir, come in only to over-pronounce the reality that surrounds Pushkin and dispense information that might not be fully relevant to the viewer. That is to say that the film, in surprising spurts, ends up underestimating its audience by overstating itself, occasionally diluting the mood it had carefully built. Anupriya Goenka as the unnamed honey-trapper and an alleged spy is promising and enticing as she nudges the narrative in a new direction altogether (the small arc featuring her and Ishwak Singh is one of the highlights). But placed amidst a pool of suit-clad men who sometimes state the obvious and simple posture, her character doesn’t get the platform it deserves. Similarly, the portion involving Pushkin’s marriage alliance finds very little bearing on how the plot moves forward.

Some of the best thrillers about paranoia — be it Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974) or Adolfo Aristarain’s Tiempo de Revancha / Time for Revenge (1981) — function on the basis of a protagonist who always feels he/she is ahead of the curve, only to be disillusioned at the worst possible moment. In Berlin, though, the central character’s choice to subvert and go against the machine occurs abruptly and also a little too early on in the proceedings.

The film’s juggling act between maintaining suspense (and asserting the dominance of bureaucracy over the common man) and the emotional dynamics of the characters is admirable, but the tall ambition carries a few blips along the way. Yet, what makes Berlin a gripping watch is its clarity and a tender heart which make the small moments speak volumes. The characters are cinematic yet quite real and they showcase human complexities the way most Hindi films have forgotten: with the right balance of intrigue, finesse and showmanship.

Berlin is currently streaming on Zee5