Slow drama

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Yeh Faasley is a murder mystery bubble-wrapped in a far more interesting story about a lacerating marriage between a Rajasthani royal and a Jat mazdoor. The film’s main story unravels in instalments, but each time a part was revealed, I found myself staring at the discarded strip of the wrapping. The bubbles were tantalising, begging to be burst.

A pretty young thing, Arunima (Tena Desae), returns from hostel to the large farmhouse of her father, Devinder Devilal Dua (Anupam Kher). A rich builder, Dua is full of contradictions — he often relaxes on green grass, is generous but is also seething with rage.
So there’s dad, daughter and her distorted memories of her mother, Ragini (Rachita Bhattacharya). Dua doesn’t talk about what happened to Ragini, how she died, what was she like. But Arunima wants to know. So she goes through Ragini’s stuff, listens to her concert tapes and comes up with a couple of things — one Diggi Uncle (Pawan Malhotra), her mother’s buddy, and niggling doubts about her father’s role in Ragini’s accident.
Arunima seeks answers, but Dua stalls, hides away stuff, mumbles something about rotten royals and how Diggi Uncle was always around. But Arunima is not satisfied, so she returns to digging up the past and soon evidence against Dua starts to weigh down the scale to one side. She is torn and confused, and is consoled and counselled by boyfriend Manu (Rushad Rana). But when she finds an eyewitness, she drags dad to court. But Dua, connected and moneyed, gets acquitted. In Arunima’s eyes, however, he’s still guilty. So she investigates more, hires a good lawyer, and Dua is back in the dock and this time he confesses. Or so everybody thinks…

DEBUTANT DIRECTOR Yogesh Mittal’s Yeh Faasley is a slow-paced, rather long psycho-drama that sustains interest because of its strong story, and the prospect of watching Anupam Kher how we best remember him, as the angry and grieving father in Saaransh. On story and its telling, the film does OK, on Kher it disappoints. The fire in the Kher belly is gone. Edges are rounded, dull. Also, he is not helped by the film’s script. Dua’s character is, as if, written with several ellipses. We don’t get a complete, comprehensible picture. Same with Diggi’s character.
But what I liked about Yeh Faasley is its focus on telling its story — about a daughter suspecting and investigating her own father’s role in her mother’s death. This is compelling stuff, and Mittal’s use of clever flashback — we see the same accident, the same fight, from several angles, depending on who is doing the recounting — keeps the mystery alive. But that's all we see of the painful marriage. One fight, without a context. There's no before or after. College romances in Bollywood don't sour often. Since this one did, we would have really liked to know why, when.
Apart from this, a silly romance and an even sillier climatic slap, Mittal is pleasantly self-assured and confident in telling his story at the pace and in the style he wants. Though, at the end, he leaves several lose ends dangling.
Mittal, however, deals with the daughter’s dilemma — one second she believes that her father is a scheming, lying, murderer, and the next second looks at him and knows that he couldn’t have done it — very nicely. Arunima’s frustration is subtly brought out in a sensitive act by Tena Desae.
While Mittal’s story-telling is low on melodrama, it is also low on glamour and often sags. At several points in the film I felt like I was being driven around a rounbdabout just to kill time. Also, somewhere along the way, as Mittal tries to tell the story of a mismatched marriage, of royalty versus commoner, of a grown man’s complexes and suspicions, the message that gets out is that marriages should be between social equals. Eeks.