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 lm set entirely in 1990s New Delhi. In Atul Sabharwal’s atmospheric spy drama, Berlin denotes a café — or co ee 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 deaf-mute 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 writer- lmmaker grew up in Agra, in an India that hadn’t yet shaken o its Soviet in¦uence. 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 ction and manuals on gadgetry,” Sabharwal recalls, “Doordarshan must have had a tie-up 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 lm. He picked up the character while hanging out at a Costa Co ee in Mumbai, which employed deaf-mute 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 in¦uence. I also just love the look and feel of John le Carré TV adaptations. The characters in those shows look like diplomats and o¨cials I have seen.”
While not a silent lm, Berlin
often plays like one. The lm’s leads, Ishwak and Aparshakti, workshopped in sign language in Mumbai for months. They also interacted with people from the deaf-mute 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 lm like this,” Ishwak smiles.
K (Krishna Kumar), the Chennai-based composer of Yuddham Sei, Aandavan Kattalai and Thuramukham,
supplied the score for Berlin,
while Anthony BJ Ruban is the sound designer.
“Because the lm is about a deaf-mute character and his memories, we wanted a soundscape that is non-intrusive 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?”
Berlin was recently played at the Habitat Film Festival in Delhi