Soon as Rahul daCunha’s play, Pune Highway, premiered in Mumbai’s in 2004, daCunha tells me, ‘Bugs’ Bhargava Krishna, who was then acting in the production, had director Anurag Kashyap over to watch it.
Chiefly, to gauge if there was a film in it, to adapt. For which, there could only be two options.
One, you could continue with the play’s motel-room setting. “Like [Richard Linklater’s] Tape,” daCunha mentions one of my favourite films (ever).
Two, “you could open it up to all the locations that the characters in the film talk about [in the room].”
Nothing really came of the potential Krishna-Kashyap collaboration. 21 years hence, Krishna-daCunha have co-written, co-directed Pune Highway for the big screen, picking screenplay option two.
That is, the film opens with a dead-body floating in an Ozark-like lake. This is meant to be off Pune Highway. Guessing, this is before Pune-Expressway came up—bringing a racy, breezy, therapeutic touch to our Mumbai-Pune car-rides!
The said dead-body is anonymous. What the film follows then is the story of ‘Famous Five’ type childhood, ‘building friends’ (Jim Sarbh, Amit Sadh, Manjari Fadnnis, Anuvab Pal), and those around them. This is over their “three timelines, aged 12, 25, and 40 [present-day].”
Pune Highway is essentially a murder mystery, with the needle of suspicion swiftly shifting between multiple characters.
Albeit on the small screen, I’ve watched this whodunnit twice. Not so much for the far too many of its characters as for how the loose ends of the thick, unpretentious plot get tied up, eventually.
The devil may be in the detail; the saint is surely in the structure.
I reckon it’d be as pleasurable to hear a verbal narration of this script as to watch it; on screen, or stage. You could go so far as to say there’s too much plot, as in story, for cinema as such; if that makes any sense. I enjoyed it more the second time on.
My sense is if Pune Highway, originally in English, had released circa 2004 — especially observing actors Sarbh, Pal, etc — it would’ve been an English film, with a mix of other languages, for local authenticity.
Around 2000s, there was actually a sliver of cinema/multiplex window allowing for Indian-English indie entertainers as select/limited releases: starting with Hyderabad Blues (1998), Rockford (1999), Split Wide Open (1999), Monsoon Wedding (2001), down to Dance Like A Man (2004), Being Cyrus (2005), 15 Park Avenue (2005)…
Why, even from English, August (1994) to the supremely underrated Loins of Punjab Presents (2007)!
Actor Rahul Bose, who starred in several such films (even directed one: Everybody Says I’m Fine!) explained to me once why this window got shut off.
He said Mumbai producers basically realised, if they simply switched language to Hindi, given the same English script, they could hugely widen the release. No other change to be made.
Just switch from English, which is also daCunha’s “first language”— hence, Pune Highway had to be in Hindi, and that he finds quite perplexing.
Polymath daCunha, also a much-loved columnist with this paper, says, “English plays have been thriving, for years; in fact, way better than Hindi stage — that’s not even a scene, outside Prithvi and NCPA, unless you have stars in them [in Mumbai]!”
Pune Highway is veteran theatre-maker daCunha’s film debut. Yeah, agree; age’s just a number (until your back hurts, I guess)! His filmmaking partner, also ad-man, Krishna, is 63. Pune Highway is his third feature, although his first theatrical release.
Subsequently, I speed-watched Krishna’s other two films; likewise, murder-mysteries (on Zee5), Barot House (2019; starring Sadh, Fadnnis), and Nail Polish (2021; with Arjun Rampal, Manav Kaul).
Observing the genre, the fact of starting with a dead-body, and working the script backwards from it; looking at suave, suited lawyers; a character inevitably dealing with psychological issues, drawing from childhood trauma…
I tell daCunha, Pune Highway feels like the culmination of a trilogy. He laughs over the phone, “I’m gonna call Bugs, and tell him that!”
He adds, “But you’re right — while I’m obsessed with friendships, and the play came from my mind, with noir, elements of horror — it does seem as if it’s marrying with the two other films [Krishna’s] done! No question about it; third part of a trilogy!”
daCunha is part of India’s pop-culture history for the Amul hoarding campaign he’s captained for over 30 years — displaying a new ad, often five times a week; sharply reflecting topical, trending topics from current affairs.
His Amul ads could simply parallel contemporary history in ways that books entertainingly can’t.
Though I didn’t tell him so, the first time I felt chuffed at being a journalist, in my early 20s, was when a story of mine (a moral-police principal, banning St Xavier’s College prom) made it to his Amul hoarding! It denotes arrival of sorts.
The lines are top-class wordplays. It’s the treasured trait of quality news/features as well, that online click baits can’t replicate.
daCunha is that consistent advertising pun-dit; at it, over decades. I ask him what headline/copy might he place for his own film on an
Amul hoarding?
He says, “Punny highway!” That Pune Highway has a cinema hoarding, in these times, is no mean feat itself. Certainly, a dream come true, for daCunha, at 62.
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture.
He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
