Merry Christmas: The Year’s Most Definitive Romance Is Already Here

IT is Christmas eve and a man is sitting at the bar alone. He has no one at home and nowhere to be. Near the washroom, he meets a hassled stranger. “Tell the woman on that table that I have left,” the latter says and flees. The informer, now burdened to lie to someone he has never met, trudges along. A woman is presumably sitting with her daughter. Next to them is a big teddy bear. All three point their gaze when the message is delivered. The air is thick with disappointment and polite smiles are exchanged. The nameless woman leaves the restaurant but the man’s eyes keep trailing her. This is Christmas (eve) and what have you done?

Sriram Raghavan, one of the most fascinating directors in Hindi cinema, is in the second decade of his career. Five feature films later, he is a genre unto himself. You don’t watch his films as much as his films watch your eyes darting across the screen in fear of missing a clue. There is death, there is a killer, there are cops, and there is retribution. The style is distinct. There are Easter eggs scattered across the frame and payoffs for trivia-attuned cinephiles. There is dishonesty aplenty and a thriving moral core. And all of these make a Sriram Raghavan film.

Merry Christmas, his first work in five years and adapted from a French novel, is an extension of his oeuvre and a disruption in his filmography. It is the most Sriram Raghavan film he has made and the most unlike Sriram Raghavan film only he could have made. The outing is a reiteration of his craft, a stunning example of his finesse as a filmmaker, and fresh evidence of his pursuit as a storyteller. This is the story he probably always wanted to tell and this is the story he was probably always telling. Except we were looking elsewhere. Twenty years since familiarising us with his tailored gore, the filmmaker plunges his hands inside his trove of tales, threatening us with more mayhem. But what comes out is a beating heart. Raghavan holds it gently in his palm and gives it a name: Merry Christmas.

When Mumbai was still Bombay and when people looked each other in the eye and spoke, two strangers met in the city. On Christmas eve, Maria (Katrina Kaif), a mother of one, had stepped out for a date. Albert (Vijay Sethupathi), an architect who just returned to Bombay from Dubai, was in the same restaurant, hanging out alone at the bar. In a tryst of fate, when Maria’s date chickened out on seeing her daughter Annie, it fell upon Albert to break the news to her. The two strangers met on Christmas eve and spent a fateful night together.

As a one-line premise, Merry Christmas thrives with potential. And that Raghavan is the maker frames the anticipation. When Maria takes Albert to her place, one inherently suspects that something is amiss. The carefully curated house looks designed to be hiding something. One looks at everything with distrust. Maria says her daughter cannot speak. Might that be true? She says she escaped an abusive marriage only to land in another one, but where is the proof? The gaze then turns to Albert. His mother passed away when he was still in Dubai. We see him roaming about the city at night, taking in all the sights as if he had reluctantly stayed away and not voluntarily moved. Who among them is lying?

Both of them are and both of them are not. Merry Christmas is Raghavan’s quietest, most fuss-free work so far. It hews close to his cultivated style. The camera languidly stays on the characters as they occupy the frame and keeps following them with fluid agility. Hindi retro pop scores and Western classical (Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” features in a crucial moment) score one scene after the other, orchestrating our apprehension and dialling up our fears. People die and cops appear, and the moral compass remains firmly in place. A ticket with Rajesh Khanna’s face embossed on it makes an appearance with one line of hope: “the night is darkest before the dawn”. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), a film about a man haunted by his first wife, plays in a nearby theatre; so does The Adventures of Pinocchio (1940…1996?), a classic moral story about punishment. But this is a love story.

In his new film, Raghavan takes everything he is known for and uses them in service of the most heartbreaking romance in recent times. As a result, regular things are imbued with deeper meaning. Lifts, invented to carry people to known destinations but fated to be stuck in time, become a portal for a timeless kiss. Swans made out of paper, prone to be crushed carelessly, assumes the diligence of a promise. A metal miniature of a bird caught in a cage becomes the metaphor of both love and the lover. A night spent together becomes most fulfilling despite there remaining no evidence of it. And a singular act of selflessness metamorphoses into the greatest show of love with the city presenting itself as an alibi and witness.

This is not to say that Merry Christmas surrenders reason at the altar of feelings. It is a perfectly smart film that bursts at the seams with humour. The actors help immensely. Kaif and Sethupathi have a throbbing chemistry precisely for how unlike they are as actors and the film only gains from their divergent energies. Kaif is smartly cast and her straight face, otherwise symptomatic of a lesser turn, adds to the opaqueness of the character. The film also deftly weaponises the common perception towards her for a bigger reveal. But it is Sethupathi who stands tall, making moments work by his sheer presence. It is not that he does much. On the contrary, he does very little but everything adds up. Take that scene for instance where he wears shades inside the house to hide that he is blushing. Or the way he glances at Kaif at any given point in time. The actor has the most evocative pair of eyes, capable of peering into one’s soul.

In Hindi films of late there has not just been a paucity of love stories but the very definition of love has come under the scanner. With Merry Christmas, the 60-year-old filmmaker has put forth his idea of it. He sneaks in a murder, splices up the screen often, crushes some pills and hides a ring. He then takes it all and crafts the most unforgettable closing minutes of a film in recent times which plays out like a symphony orchestra with Raghavan conducting a million emotions without a word.

The greatness of the moment elevates everything. What was supposed to be a confession transforms into a proposal and a deathly night becomes an exposition of tenderness. It all happens on Christmas eve, a day celebrated as Jesus Christ’s birthday but remembered really for his sacrifice. He suffered to atone for the sins of others and died so that the rest of us could live. Raghavan uses this as the context and offers his belief in the guise of a question: sacrifice might not be the only proof of love but what is love without sacrifice?