Black, White & Grey: Disorienting, Yet Deliciously Twisted

In SonyLIV's Black, White & Grey, The Truth Isn’t The Point

Black, White & Grey plays the mockumentary format like a parlour trick — turning taped interviews and staged memories into a riveting maze of love, lies, and unreliable truths, writes Manik Sharma .

BY THE MIDPOINT OF SonyLIV ’s awfully titled Black, White & Grey: Love Kills, a life-and-death twist kicks the fairly straightforward — if sprawling — narrative into the air. It’s a big swing towards the hedges of anticipation, the kind that could be accused of borrowing from the kitschy parlour tricks of India’s cable TV age. But here, it miraculously lands. Most of it is down to this mockumentary finding that rare balance between truth and truisms, the imitation of reality and the perpetuation of its suspicions. To which effect, the twists and detours puncture both what seems honest and that which seems maligned by lies. It makes for a bewitching yarn of confusion and conjecture. For once, a mockumentary earns its episodic structure, its restraint, and its bursts of grim violence. It’s not always exceptional, but it punches well above its weight.

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The show begins like a standard documentary. A girl went missing two years ago. Witnesses, investigating officers allege murder. A western journalist called Daniel Gray (one of the few puzzling narrative selections) is, however, doggedly chasing a deeper mystery. One which connects not one, but many deaths. At first, the structure threatens to devolve into a version of Crime Patrol dressed up with the tact and tools of streaming: Moodier, tighter, up-scaled, but still imprisoned by the garishness of awkward cops, fragile victims and shifty relatives in denial. Except, this show has a trick or two up its sleeve.

Mayur More plays — or rather, enacts — the driver of a politically influential man. He is secretly courting the mogul’s daughter.The two plan to elope to a shady hotel to seal the deal on months of unconsummated infatuation. The undercurrent of discomfort and tragedy is writ large on the plan. We’ve seen how these across-the-class-barrier love stories end. However, that is neither the mystery nor the point of the story. It’s merely the starting point for a narrative that connects a temporarily blinded cop (played by a terrific Tigmanshu Dhulia); a Malayali cab driver; a mercenary for hire; and possibly thousands of kilometres between cause and effect, between clues and the conflict they hint at. It all seems implausible from the get-go but the show sticks enough meat to the bones of a wildly experimental idea, to make the broth worth brewing and investing in.

Directed by Pushkar Sunil Mahaba, Black, White & Grey ’s strength lies in its ability to make performance central to both interviews and unfolding events. The mock interviews stitch the glove that the re-enactment lifts. Usually, this format only switches between the energy of the two, but here the reconstruction adds to the momentum, helps re-engineer new subplots and carves new pathways populated by distrust, accidents and India’s conflicted underbelly. Because we know everything is ultimately fiction, it’s like witnessing several cards unfold at once. Disorienting, yet deliciously twisted. Each bit shifts the goalpost just a little bit more. None of which would be possible without the commitment of a largely understated cast.

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What works for the show is its ability to know when to switch between threads, when to turn the camera to pure performance and when to herald the knee-jerk of reality. A close friend of the victim spouts confessions, corks this rage against patriarchy in between the actual unfolding of events. It feels like switching shoes between the teller and the viewer, a body-swapping act of placing yourself in a world before withdrawing to also analyse its slits and wounds. It feeds into the disbelief that both are disasters: the fact that what’s happening has happened or that none of it ever happened. It’s two stories, two ironclad houses of belief, disproving each other’s validity. A bewitching rubik's cube of action, doubt, reaction and coincidence. Exchanging energy, pulling either by the side, only to make the core material, the sense of mystery deeper, confounding and intriguing.

The only problem with a show so ambitious is that its visual grammar and scale can often feel wanting. But the writing, the nifty directorial language, pulls well above its ceiling. The close cuts, the changing landscapes, the sobering texture, and the use of a striking colour palette all contribute to this sense of mystery that explodes in chapters as opposed to a singular cliffhanger. Of which there are more than one. Even the risky, rug-pulling twist in the middle only adds to the exhilarating sense that this epic of accidents and intent is equal parts myth and mystery. Nothing could be a greater compliment that despite its modest cast, this mockumentary gets the brief of streaming, by planting pebbles, slippery mush and the odd pointy gem as part of a wave of ideas, defiantly flowing upstream. If only they could have called it something else.

Watch Black, White & Grey here

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