From Russia with love
All about director Atul Sabharwal’s Berlin, a moody espionage thriller set in the intelligence circles of Delhi
Berlin is an unusual title choice for a Hindi film set entirely in 1990s New Delhi. In Atul Sabharwal’s atmospheric spy drama, Berlin denotes a café — or coffee house, as they were once known — in the national capital. Shrouded in cigarette smoke and intrigue, it is tucked away on a nondescript plaza in the city’s diplomatic enclave. The setting is winter, 1993, in the runup to Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s landmark visit to India.
Ashok, a deafmute waiter played by Ishwak Singh, is arrested in connection to an assassination plot. He is held inside an imposing government building, called simply the Bureau, and interrogated by
Pushkin (Aparshakti Khurana), a sign language instructor from a local school. Watching over their every move, with unblinking aplomb, is Jagdish, a sly, shifty intelligence man played by Rahul Bose.
Berlin is Sabharwal’s third feature after the cop drama Class of ‘83 (2020) and Aurangzeb (2013). The writerfilmmaker grew up in Agra, in an India that hadn’t yet shaken off its Soviet influence. English and Hindi translations of the Russian greats (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy) would be disbursed on mobile vans and vastly read by school children. “There was also a lot of Soviet science fiction and manuals on gadgetry,” Sabharwal recalls, “Doordarshan must have had a tieup with socialist countries because the athlete Nadia Comăneci was very popular on television,” Sabharwal says. “We would open the newspaper and see Indian politicians visiting Moscow, etc. There was a certain ‘Russo’ atmosphere, so to speak. The Soviet Union was always more in conversation than USA.”
Its Cold War intrigues notwithstanding, Berlin emerged from a personal space for Sabharwal. There was a time in his career, he says, when he felt trapped between institutions and forces greater than him, much like Ashok in the film. He picked up the character while hanging out at a Costa Coffee in Mumbai, which employed deafmute waiters. Sabharwal combined these prompts with his childhood memories and the astringent spy cinema of
England and America. “Alan J Pakula’s Watergate time paranoia thrillers like The Parallax View and All the President’s Men were an influence. I also just love the look and feel of John le Carré TV adaptations. The characters in those shows look like diplomats and officials I have seen.”
While not a silent film, Berlin often plays like one. The film’s leads, Ishwak and Aparshakti, workshopped in sign language in Mumbai for months. They also interacted with people from the deafmute community in Dongri. “The whole process was so organic that signing just went into my system,” Aparkshati says. It got to a point where the actors could improvise in sign. “That was the whole idea for a film like this,” Ishwak smiles.
K (Krishna Kumar), the Chennaibased composer of Yuddham Sei, Aandavan Kattalai and Thuramukham, supplied the score for Berlin, while Anthony BJ Ruban is the sound designer.
“Because the film is about a deafmute character and his memories, we wanted a soundscape that is nonintrusive yet suspenseful and entertaining,” Sabharwal says.
A reference by contrast was Walter Murch’s work on The English Patient (1996), which stitches through sound and music its protagonist’s memories across two timelines. “I asked Anthony, ‘How do we achieve the opposite of that? What do memories feel like in the absence of sound?”
The music fior Berlin is by K (Krishna Kumar), the Chennaibased composer known for his work in Yuddham Sei and Aandavan Kattalai