So what does the director do here? Navdeep Singh has crafted a film dripping with nuances of life in a small desert town, and has used the metaphor of the desert to suggest the aridness and sterility of the life of the chief protagonist, Satyaveer Randhawa, underplayed superbly by Abhay Deol. The Noir (French for night, literally and figuratively standing for ‘black film’) genre gave us such Hollywood films like The Maltese Falcon and The Asphalt Jungle in the forties and fifties, and more recently the conventions of the genre have been reworked in neo noir films like the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Yes, in the fifties we had them for sure, notable amongst them being Baazi and Aar Paar, both directed by Guru Dutt, but they suffered from the fact that the mores of film making in India did not really allow the chief protagonist to be cynical, morally ambiguous, and deeply pessimistic about the world: a world that was jaded and characterized by an acute loss of faith in ‘universal’ values of love and justice.
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