In Baby Do Die Do, director Nachiket Samant remolds Mumbai into a noirish, neon-lit comic-book world. It's a Mumbai that seems lifted straight out of an anime, with its tall, dark skyscrapers and pink-blue LED boards displaying simple, graphic advertisements. For the first few minutes of the film, as the camera tracks a raindrop and then a deaf and mute assassin named Baby (Huma Qureshi) as she boards a crowded local train to complete an assignment, this world feels strangely dystopian, claustrophobic, and tainted with rot. However, the more you watch the film—the more familiar you become with its story, its setting, its characters—the less enchanted you feel by Samant's visual flourishes. On the one hand, one can credit Samant for successfully executing his simple story in simple terms. But on the other hand, it's hard to deny the stench of pedestrianism lurking within a creatively impoverished story and its colorful stick figures. Samant has, in effect, not only made a mediocre film, but seems proud of his mediocrity as well. But since that mediocrity is also wrapped in a script filled with "clever" callbacks (a white bird, a pair of red shoes, someone taking pride in working at the high court) and touches like split screens and black-and-white flashbacks, Baby Do Die Do was met with enthusiastic critical acclaim when it hit theaters earlier this year.
These verbal and visual exertions create an illusion of freshness that Samant is able to sustain for maybe 15-20 minutes. Soon, however, you realize that the movie is all shiny surface, inflated with air and emptiness. Samant takes interesting, quirky characters—a deaf and mute contract killer, a failed musician-turned-music teacher, a builder-criminal who dotes on his "little" brother, and a cop who extends her hand for fist bumps—only to flatten their quirks and mannerisms into conduits for plot-related exposition. The black-and-white flashback that shows how Baby met Siddhu (Rachit Singh) is shot like something out of a silent-era film, but it could have been in color, like most of Baby Do Die Do, and you would not have felt any differently about the sequence. Even the split-screen conversations between Baby and Papa (Chunky Pandey) just look cool, given that what they convey is basic information: do this, do that.
This is somewhat surprising given the striking, amusing vocabulary of the songs. Sample: Teri adaalate mein meri bagaawat/My lord, main hoon god/Sar jhuka, daal le aadat/Soch band kamre mein tu...aur Alpha Q. The songs in Baby Do Die Do have more color, more imagination than the sober, plain, unremarkable dialogue that merely moves the story forward. There is a funny, confident movie within Baby Do Die Do that consists of more jokes, like the one where Lucky (Arun Kushwah) and Zafar (Sikandar Kher) urgently talk to one another on the phone until, unbeknownst to Zafar, Lucky emerges behind him and they continue their conversation in front of each other. Samant, though, doesn't really know how to be consistently funny or how to detonate his gags one after another. And so, you get brief, mild, tiny patches of amusement surrounded by overblown stylistic tricks that try to sell you on the notion that you are being guided by the hands of an inventive filmmaker.
Samant's "inventions," to be frank, are utterly superficial. His decorative style strains to compensate for barely developed substance. Apart from distorting sound for a few seconds during the opening and using subtitles during a meet-cute sequence, Samant has little to say about how someone like Baby might experience the world. He doesn't even bother to be curious about her practical experiences. We are told that Baby desires to marry a boy, that she wants to live a married life, that she too craves bodily pleasures. She gets a love interest in Siddhu, all right, though their relationship is devoid of any sense of intimacy or curiosity about each other's interests, routines, or work. Does Baby watch movies? Has she ever read a book? What's her level of education? Siddhu talks to Baby about buying a bigger apartment, but there is no conversation between them about their current bank balances, how much they individually earn, or whether they will contribute equally toward buying the new flat. What's more, after showing Baby longing for intimacy as couples high on love roam around her, Samant doesn't bother to find out how Baby feels after having what could very well be her first sexual experience.
In lieu of a subjective, personal lens, Samant opts for ostentatious competence that reeks of banal ideas, unoriginal substance, and trite incidents. Samant smiles at his own average realization of an average story—those bright neon lights could very well be his own celebratory fireworks. And then there are plot twists that want to be so unpredictable that they become predictable. Samant loves these twists and turns, and he genuinely seems to think that by pulling the rug out from beneath our feet, he is pumping up our excitement meter. Talk about living in delusion. Or perhaps he was blinded by the brightness of those neon-lit advertisements. One of the twists, which comes near the end, changes the very identity of a character and, in a way, attempts to make an emotional point about loss and trauma. But with such thin puppets, all we register is relief that Samant finally embraces what we easily figured out long, long, long before the climax. He is fooling nobody with that opening and that voiceover. Baby Do Die Do has about as much emotional complexity as a disposable Marvel-like adventure. The only difference is that Samant is less of an entertainer and more of a poseur who, above all, wants to be perceived as terribly clever (wait till you see the reason behind the movie's title). Forget Baby Do Die Do; with all this empty flamboyance, I began to hum Baby Shark Do Do Do Do Do to rescue myself from boredom. I can't say it made the movie any better, but hey, I was distracted enough from the director's self-satisfied blandness. In my book, that's a win—in some respects.
Written by - Vikas Yadav
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Publisher at Midgard Times