The girl on the train cast: Parineeti Chopra, Avinash Tiwary, Aditi Rao Hydari, Kirti Kulhari, Tota Roy Chowdhury
The director of the girl on the train: Ribhu Dasgupta
The girl on the train rating: Two stars.
Mira Kapoor is a girl in a train. She is a lush. Armed with a hip butt in which deep tracks are regularly made. Thick coal-stained eyes, indistinct tongue, misty brain. She takes the same train back and forth from London to the suburbs every day. Every day she walks past her former house, which falls along the tracks, in which a beautiful woman who envies Mira lives. And then one day that woman is missing. A body is found in the forest. And questions abound.
This latest edition of ‘The Girl On The Train’ comes after the eponymous Hollywood version in which Emily Blunt portrays the alcoholic stalker with a dark past, which in turn is based on Paula Hawkins’ bestselling novel. The use of the ‘girl’ in the title can be used to remind you of ‘Gone Girl’, in which Gillian Flynn gives us a glimpse of the sexual, sensual girl who uses her cunning to buy her way out of trouble. (It also introduced an endless series of thrillers with ‘girl’ in the title.) Hawkins’ girl was not as sharp as that of Flynn, but there was something deceptive about the way she dropped us in her head, although the film is also very much going on – too many characters, too much vodka, too many red herrings. It was Blunt’s performance, even if it was not her best, that carried the film through.
The problem with Parineeti Chopra’s Mira is that you never quite buy her. As the girl with an unresolved trauma tries to sit behind her broken marriage, the actor just looks good. Much thought has been given to the unmade hair, the smeared eyeliner, the bloodshot eyes. But she was not written with enough depth. We have no idea who Mira is, before and after she meets the clever Shekhar (Avinash Tiwary), who wins her over before the first song appears. Yes, there are songs in the movie. A Bollywood adaptation of a murder mystery without ‘naach-gaana’, in 2021? Forget the thought. This is also the reason why the film is two hours long.
The overemphasized writing lets down the plot, which is in any case filled with seemingly unrelated characters jumping in and out: a lot of policewoman (Kriti Kulhari) is assigned to the case, a mysterious photographer crawls around the same forest where the body is found; a place of extortion is in the air; an over-friendly shrink (Roy Chowdhury) appears fleeting, just like a desi gang. The characters come, and before we can clock it, they go. And Nusrat (Aditi Rao Hydari), the beautiful woman who puts everything in motion, could just as well have been a wrap, so insignificant is she.
It is only after a good hour has passed that the excessive Chopra has sat down, to dig deeper into her role and deliver moments when you can see the girl’s pain, even if it is fleeting. And then the film swings straight back to its turbulent constructions, with a difficult swallow climax. Somewhere in the film, Mira is spotted at Paddington station, and your lightning flashes back to the almost perfect Agatha Christie version ‘4.50 From Paddington’, which is also about a crime witnessed from a train compartment. Now it’s writing. Here you can see that the dialogue comes a mile away. At one point, Chopra’s character says ‘mujhe apna past nahin badalna’, and you know, before she opens her mouth, that she will say, ‘I want to change my present’.
And this one, even better, again from Chopra: “main usko kabhi nahin bataa paayi ki woh main nahin, mera wound tha (I could never tell him that it was not me, it was my wound)”. You do not say.