Ghutan (2007)

Two young, samey looking men are entering an old, dilapidated graveyard by night. They carry a coffin and the body of a woman with a badly cut face who soon opens her eyes to protest being buried with them. It seems her captors - one of whom is her husband -thought her to be dead. The logical course of action is to just bury her alive. Of course. Even though she begs to be first killed and then buried, the two mean bastards (a word the subtitles charmingly translate as "scoundrel") proceed to nail her coffin shut, bury it in a very shallow grave and put a heavy paper cross on top.

When he returns home, the husband is in a self-pitying mood. I nearly cried my heart out for the jerk, I tell you. He starts to reminisce about his road to becoming a killer. It was only yesterday...

Ravi Kapoor (Aryan Vaid) is one heck of a guy: he married Catherine (Heena Tasleem - absolutely brilliant in her overacting ways) for her money and probably a little bit of sex, and now that they are man and wife he spends his time as the manager of Catherine's fashion business. That is to say when he is not cavorting around at parties, womanizing, spending his wife's money or wasting his time with his jerky friends. The worst of them is Jaggi (Tarun Arora). He and Ravi are inseperable. They even share Ravi's "personal secretary". And wouldn't you know? Ravi really needs a new one, the last one has gotten herself pregnant, and it's all Jaggi's fault (queue jackassy male laughter here). Jaggi, as Ravi's best friend and personal pimp has already found a suitable candidate for the position in Priya (Pooja Bharti). On her first working day she has to accompany Ravi to an important business meeting (also known as a "party"). To Ravi's friends' puzzlement his drunken groping doesn't go over to well with his secretary, who is of the outlandish opinion he should rather be groping his wife.

Speaking of Catherine, while Ravi is having fun, she drowns her pain in wildly melodramatic piano playing (with picturesquely wind-touched hair) and alcohol. Yes, her husband's charming ways have driven her to the bottle and even her loyal servant Nancy can't keep her away from it.

When Catherine cannot cope any longer, she makes a drunken call to her loving spouse. She threatens to kill herself if he doesn't come home right now. He tells her where he put the sleeping pills. Marriage is a wonderful thing. Confronted with so much warmth and love, Catherine flees to the only person she still trusts: her catholic priest. She couldn't have asked for a better person to help out with her marriage troubles than a man who has sworn never to marry or have sex, of course. The Father's advice is as helpful as was to be expected. Catherine just has to stay calm. Ravi will come around some day. In her saddened state of mind, the poor woman translates this as: "dress up in your best negligee and seduce your own husband".

The latter part turns out to be far easier said than done when one's husband only loves one's money and himself, so their nightly meeting culminates in another family discussion. He calls her a bitch (in subtitlespeak "idiot"), she calls him a bastard (still "scoundrel"). When she calls him impotent, Ravi hits her. Of course, she explains (winning me over completely), this only proves his impotence.

The next day at the company doesn't go too well for Ravi, either. Catherine has cut off his money supply, so it could get a little difficult for him to pay the bills.

Fortunately, dear Jago Jaggi is there to help. He probably has a plan, I'm just not too sure what it is. The jerk of jerks seems to be trying to get Catherine as drunk as possible to 1) leer at her and grope a little 2) get her to pay Ravi's bills. The leering part goes swell, but right at the moment when she is crying her heart out and he is starting to take advantage of her state, Ravi enters and gets really, really angry with both of them. After he has punched Jaggi and driven him to flight, he starts arguing with Catherine. The argument gets physical and a husbandly throw leads to Catherine's near death. Jaggi returns soon enough and together they get on their way to the already described graveyard scene, not before threatening to kill Nancy, who has witnessed some of the niceties, if she tells anybody what Ravi has done. If asked, she is to explain that Catherine has left her husband and has fled to her uncle Tom (yeah, I know) in Goa.

Later, back in Catherine's coffin, she manages to punch a hole into her cage and crawl back to the surface in a very effective scene. Obviously her way leads her directly to her priest, whom she begs for help. He declines. Being a catholic priest he is of course an intensely skilled expert in the supernatural and has at once recognized Catherine as what she is now - not the living body, but Catherine's soul that is not rising up to Heaven thanks to her terrible death. Her body is still inside the coffin! He further warns her against reuniting with her body, which would be a sinful thing to do and turn her "into an Evil. A LIVING DEAD!". The still rightly pissed Catherine doesn't mind becoming one of the Living Dead as long as this means vengeance on her murderous hubby.

From now on, undead Catherine is going to devote all of her considerable power and her growing mad hatred to make Ravi's life a living hell, as suffocating as her death has been.

There's not much the Living Dead can't do, it seems, starting with evil cackling and diabolical screaming, looking a little like grown-up possessed Linda Blair, and absolutely not ending with some fine poltergeist style redecoration.

Until the film is over, Catherine also treats us to dead priests (as if the bastard, um, I meant scoundrel didn't ask for it), fun at a seance, possession, a flying and exploding bed, more melodramatic piano playing, many eye colors and quite a bit of flying (are we in Hong Kong now, Dorothy?).

We will also meet uncle Tom and the weirdest non-comedic relief police inspector Bollywood's and are witness to Ravi's interesting way of reassuring Priya by telling her that she is the victim of a misconception. He didn't kill his wife, no. She was still alive when they got to the graveyard, he just buried her alive. Yeah, that should work out fine.

 

After spending some time with his brother on doing a cable TV show called "The Zee Horror Show", one half of the terrific (or was that infamous?) Ramsay Brothers, Shyam Ramsay, returned to the world of cinema with the critically hated Dhund: The Fog in 2003. Ghutan is - as far as I know - his first new film after that comeback and the critics seem too hate this film as well.

I can understand it: The film is crass, unsubtle, cheap, absurdly overacted, artificial, lacking in musical numbers and not very original. These are not really qualities most critics admire.

But the film is all this without any shame, with a crass, unsubtle, and artificial style all its own, with so much energy and verve that it is a lot of fun to watch.

Shyam Ramsay's motto must be "more is more", yet where Western directors mostly mean "more money" when they say more, Ramsay screams (and I picture an Indian mad scientist here): "More blue light! No, not only on the graveyard, in the houses, too! More lightning! When we can have one after each sentence I damn well will use one lightning after each sentence! Scream more hysterical, Nancy! Be more of a slimy jerk, Ravi - oh sorry, be more of a slimy and jerky piece of wood, Ravi! Wait, I have an idea! Let's let Ravi's flying wife break through the cross-shaped gravestone he is trying to smack her with! And we must find a way for him to rip his shirt off before that! We must think of the women as well! Wouldn't it be great if Priya would wear a tiny bikini when Ravi confesses to her! I am so full of ideas! Mwahahaha!"

It's absolutely shameless, but I love it.

 

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