Director Sujoy Ghosh’s Netflix film Jaane Jaan hits all the right notes with its setting, the cinematography, superlative performances by the lead cast and an intriguing howdunnit storyline, but it falls short of creating any palpable tension throughout its two-hour-20-minute runtime.
The premise, an adaptation of Keigo Higashino’s novel The Devotion of Suspect X, sees a single mother commit a murder in defence and an introverted maths-nerd neighbour who helps her avoid capture by the police. In the small hilly town of Kalimpong in West Bengal, the story is set in motion when cafe owner Maya D’Souza’s (Kareena Kapoor Khan) violent ex-husband Ajit finds her some 14 years after she escaped his clutches and threatens to sell their teenage daughter just like he had sold her off to a dance bar back in Mumbai. Maya ends up killing her husband and reluctantly accepting help from her neighbour to cover up the crime.
The introverted neighbour Naren (Jaideep Ahlawat), a maths teacher in the local school, has been in love with Maya, silently watching her from a distance, showing up at her cafe every day to order lunch (‘egg fried rice’) and will seemingly go to any lengths to protect Maya, including disposing of a body and providing convincing alibis to keep suspicion away from her. Till his childhood friend Karan Anand (Vijay Varma) shows up to investigate the disappearance of Ajit, and Maya becomes his sole suspect, whose alibis he starts to tear into.
Unfortunately, the cat-and-mouse game between the police officer and the maths teacher never hits the will-he-won’t-he tension that it does in Drishyam, another film loosely inspired by the same book. One of the reasons is that the stakes never feel too high. With little to no background information, character motivations just don’t seem compelling enough to rouse the audience to root for them. We don’t know much about Maya other than that she is an abuse survivor; Naren is in love with Maya to near obsession but why does he go to the lengths that he does? Police officer Karan gets the shortest shrift in character building and motivation other than the fact that he is charming and flirtatious and doesn’t give up easily.
Some convenient plot points aside (Karan seems too quick to doubt Maya), the movie never reaches the ‘how is he/she going to get out of this one’ crescendo that might keep the audience on the edge of their seats. Even the final twist is spelt out in a sequence earlier in the film and therefore fails to have the desired impact.
The credit of making the film work therefore lies with the powerhouse performances from the lead actors who manage to keep the audience hooked and invested. Kareena is phenomenal as the tough yet vulnerable single mother, de-glamming to become a regular Joe/Jane who will fight tooth and nail to keep her daughter safe. You can see a glimpse of the siren in her in a karaoke scene but it never feels out of place given how it ties in with her past. In her interactions with both Naren and Karan, she keeps you guessing whether she is taking advantage of the effect she has on them or just grasping at whatever straws she can.
Vijay Varma is charming as the quick-witted police officer and his chemistry with both Maya and his long-lost classmate ‘Naroo’ (Naren) is off the charts. But the one who steals the show is Jaideep Ahlawat. He walks the line between oddness and creepiness, love and obsession, genius and madness with chameleon-like changeability that makes you wonder if there is anything this man can’t do. Jaane Jaan is worth a watch for these three actors alone if nothing else.
