Reliving a niece’s murder in a graphic, ‘powerful film’
Guilty revisits 2008 murder of Star editor’s niece and a controversial conviction
I didn’t cry.
I couldn’t cry while watching Guilty (Talvar), which made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday to a packed house at Ryerson Theatre. The movie is based on the 2008 murders of Aarushi Talwar, 13, and the household help, Hemraj Banjade, 45 — and the controversial conviction of Aarushi’s mother, my cousin Nupur, and her husband Rajesh for the murders.
I had braced myself to see a portrayal of Aarushi’s dead body.
And yet, it was seeing her character alive just moments before her murder that was nearly my undoing.
I didn’t cry. Perhaps I’m more like my cousin Nupur than I realized. She was vilified for not crying on Indian TV back in May 2008, as she discussed Aarushi’s murder 10 days before Rajesh’s arrest. “I have faith in the justice system,” she had said then. Her stoicism was seen as evidence of guilt. (“What kind of mother does not cry?”)
I have written about the convictions, which the family believes are wrongful, with a professional’s hat on, taking comfort in the distance the written word can offer. The film’s visual representation threatened to pierce the safety of that cocoon.
Talvar, directed by Meghna Gulzar, is a powerful film. It is unflinching with the graphic details without being gratuitous. I watched it closely and was relieved that it stuck to the facts without embellishing or caricaturizing people in the name of “dramatization.”
Irrfan Khan ( Life of Pi, The Lunchbox) played the investigator focused on evidence-gathering, but I was more focused on whether Konkona Sen Sharma and Neeraj Kabi could capture the essence of Nupur and Rajesh. They did, and credibly so.
There was one scene, though, that I could not watch.
The film presents three versions of events as investigators flip-flop over the perpetrators, the motive and murder weapons. Each version revisits the crime scene from a different perspective. There was Rajesh’s character bludgeoning the victims and drunkenly taking a small blade to slice Aarushi’s throat. I watched it as I would any fictional movie. But in another version, when the dental clinic assistant enters the room to slash her throat, I was overwhelmed and buried my face in my hands.
This is the man against whom there was solid evidence of involvement in her death; from his house came a bloodied knife (no conclusive results) and a pillow cover with the cook’s blood on it (evidence later dismissed as a typographical error).
Talvar shows three perspectives of events, but the truth has only one version. To me, a shortcoming was that it portrayed only the incompetence of the investigators, not their malice or criminal wrongdoings. So while the film strives for balance, I hope Nupur and Rajesh are spared the agony of watching it.
Wounds that haven’t healed don’t need to be reopened.