Murder In The Hills

Whodunit In The Hills

This is #CriticalMargin, where Ishita Sengupta gets contemplative over new Hindi films and shows.

VISHAL BHARDWAJ’s Charlie Chopra & The Mystery Of Solang Valley could have been made by anyone and it wouldn’t have made a difference. The six-episode investigative dramedy is the filmmaker’s more definitive streaming debut (prior to this, he made a short for the anthology Modern Love, Mumbai in 2022) but the series’ absence from his oeuvre wouldn’t have dented it. Its presence, however, stands out as a lesser work in his otherwise towering filmography and perpetuates his recent spate of mostly forgettable work since Haider (2015). But it also lacks something that the others had in plenty: ambition.

Adapted from Agatha Christie’s 1931 novel The Sittaford Mystery, Charlie Chopra & The Mystery Of Solang Valley stays largely faithful to the original book. A family gathering leads to an evening of seance where it is revealed that someone they know will die. No sooner is the prediction made than it turns out to be true.

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Charlie Chopra & The Mystery Of Solang Valley: A Detective We Could've Done Without

By Ishita Sengupta

In his reading, Bhardwaj posits his story in the snowy hilltop of Manali. The casualty in question is Brigadier Rawat (Gulshan Grover), a wealthy man prone to be asked for monetary assistance from his tribe of relatives. The prediction of his death was made at his brother’s house when he was absent. The day Rawat died, his nephew Jimmy (Vivaan Shah) had visited him which made the latter an obvious suspect. After Jimmy is arrested, his fiancée Charlie Chopra (Wamiqa Gabbi) comes to Solang from Patiala. It doesn’t take her long to realise that Rawat was a different man to different people (unreasonable to his tenants, faithful to his friend, nice to his brother and his family, and suspicious of all). It also becomes abundantly clear that each had a motive strong enough to kill him.

Granted this is every detective fiction premise ever but there is also plenty to work with. And given that the outing is being helmed by Bhardwaj, a rare filmmaker with an inventive eye for adaptations, there is always room for ingenuity. Charlie Chopra & The Mystery Of Solang Valley, however, unfolds with staid familiarity. The storytelling is uncharacteristically contained and resists taking chances. There is a difference between remaining faithful to the plot and being tied to it. A lot of the show unravels with the weight of not wanting to be more than what it is.

For instance, the terrific ensemble Bhardwaj gathers — which ranges from Naseeruddin Shah, Ratna Pathak Shah, Imaad Shah, Priyanshu Painyuli, Paoli Dam, Lara Dutta, and Grover himself — is given precious little to work with. Each has their own narratives but none possesses arcs; six episodes later they remain actors who are saddled with their legacies and not performers who rise above the written word. Among them, it is only Grover who invites the most curiosity but his role is truncated to flashbacks.

A similar sense of inert ambition is reflected in the show’s visual language. In Charlie Chopra & The Mystery Of Solang Valley, Bhardwaj has teamed up with cinematographer Tassaduq Hussain. In the past, they have worked together in Omkara (2006), Kaminey (2009) and more recently in Modern Love. Their recent work is also one of their lesser works. The setting is all there: dense fog envelops the frames, secrets are divulged through misty reflections. But the scenes are imbued with genericness, and most of them unravel indoors.

The one way to reason this is to reckon with the fact that this is Bhardwaj being deliberately irreverent. The way he treats the central character Charlie (short form of Charulata— a probable homage to Satyajit Ray’s binocular-adorned character of the same name) provides some hints. Charlie is written as a woman of quirks. She bends her head a certain way, smells a cigar intermittently and always looks at the camera and breaks the fourth wall. There is plenty of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, not just in the way the writing is designed (Anjum Rajabali, Jyotsna Hariharan and Bhardwaj are credited) but the way it has been engineered. And therein lies the problem. Gabbi, consistently watchable if not remarkable, talks to us a lot to the point of evading our gaze when the time comes. All of this is familiar and Bhardwaj incorporates the style with a neatness in the narrative. But the grammar, down to each of the deflections, feels derivative.

It also does not help that the character is written with a nutty energy that feels deliberately manic. There is little about Charlie that makes sense. Her mother, we are told, was a detective. We get one flashback and from there she navigates from being a waiter, meeting her future boyfriend in a random meet-cute scene, investing in organic farming (don’t ask), and then getting her calling as a detective. After she comes to Solang, her process is limited to sipping tea with Rawat’s tenants and relatives and spying on them through glassy windows. It is playful, sure but there is no method to this. Amidst all this, she and everyone else in the show forget that a certain person, who most of them are related to, is in jail. Again, one can pin it down to a probable cheekiness the filmmaker was going for (maybe being a sleuth was all that Charlie cared for and her fiance being falsely imprisoned gives her a reason to pursue it) but to make this reading depends more on us than on the writers’ implication.

Having said that, the overall middling nature of the series only proves that all deficiencies are its own. It says something that one of the most prolific filmmakers of our times has made something and it is vacuous to the extent of having nothing to say. Charlie Chopra & The Mystery Of Solang Valley could have been made by anyone and it wouldn’t have made a difference. That Vishal Bhardwaj has helmed it speaks more about him than the series.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of OTTplay. The author is solely responsible for any claims arising out of the content of this column.)

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