Andhadhun


Andhadhun is a 2018 Indian Hindi-language black comedy crime thriller film co-written and directed by Sriram Raghavan. It stars Tabu, Ayushmann Khurrana, Radhika Apte and Anil Dhawan. The film tells the story of a blind piano player who unwittingly becomes embroiled in the murder of a retired actor.
The script of Andhadhun was written by Raghavan, Arijit Biswas, Pooja Ladha Surti, Yogesh Chandekar and Hemanth M. Rao. The film was edited by Surti, and K. U. Mohanan was its director of photography. Amit Trivedi composed songs for the film and Jaideep Sahni wrote the lyrics; Raftaar and Girish Nakod co-wrote the title song as guest composers, while Daniel B. George composed the background score. The film was shot in Pune in 44 days spread over more than a year; principal photography began in June 2017 and ended on 17 July 2018.
Andhadhun was released by Viacom18 Motion Pictures theatrically in India on 5 October 2018 to widespread critical acclaim. It won four awards, including Best Director and Best Screenplay, at the Screen Awards ceremony and five Filmfare Awards, including Best Film and Best Actor for Khurrana. It also won three National Film Awards: Best Feature Film in Hindi, Best Actor for Khurrana, and Best Screenplay. Grossing over at the worldwide box office, it became the fourth highest-grossing Indian film of 2018, and was remade in Telugu as Maestro, in Malayalam as Bhramam and in Tamil as Andhagan.

Plot

-based Akash Saraf is an up-and-coming pianist who fakes being blind as an experiment to improve his piano skills. One day, while crossing the street, he is knocked over by Sophie. She helps him up and learns that he is a pianist. Sophie is impressed by Akash's talent and gets him an engagement at her father's diner. Akash usually wears opaque lenses to practice playing piano, but after meeting Sophie, he is tempted to look at her. He stops wearing his opaque lenses and simply pretends to be blind. They both soon begin a romantic relationship. At the diner, a retired actor, Pramod Sinha, notices Akash and invites him to give a private performance for his wedding anniversary.
Akash arrives at the Sinhas' flat and Pramod's wife Simi opens the door. Simi, to avoid a nosy neighbour who happened to be watching and seeing that Akash is blind, lets Akash in to play the piano. Akash sees a dead body nearby, which he realizes is Pramod's, but has to feign ignorance and continue to play to keep up his act of being blind. He also sees Manohar, Simi's paramour, hiding in the bathroom with a gun. Simi and Manohar clean the crime scene and stuff the body into a suitcase while Akash plays. Akash sits on a bench to take everything in. Then, he sees a lottery ticket seller, Sakhu who has a Lord Shiva tattoo sells a lottery ticket to Ayush without really giving him the choice but tells her to call a rickshaw in return to which she calls Murli, an auto-rickshaw driver who has Aishwarya Rai's photo on the back of his auto.
Akash tries to report the murder to the police but is dissuaded when he discovers that Manohar is a police inspector over there, and makes up lies about his cat being missing. Meanwhile, Simi overhears her elderly neighbour, Mrs. D'Sa, talking to a police officer about seeing an unknown man going to the Sinhas' flat the day of Pramod's murder. Simi later kills Mrs. D'Sa by pushing her off the ledge of their apartment. Akash happens to witness upon arrival to give piano lessons to Pramod's daughter, but is forced to continue feigning blindness. A neighbour's child, suspicious of Akash's blindness, records a video of Akash fully able to see. Simi goes to Akash's house and hands him the temple's offerings as Akash makes coffee for them. After poisoning his coffee, she observes him carefully and busts his act after he spills the coffee on purpose. Akash says he will leave for London and keep Simi's secret, but gets drugged by the offerings.
The neighbour's child shows the video to Sophie. As she arrives, Simi arranges things to make it look like she and Akash had slept together. Furious and heartbroken, Sophie leaves. When he wakes up, he realises that he has been blinded by Simi. Manohar enters Akash's house to kill him, but he barely escapes, and faints after hitting a telephone pole.
Akash wakes up in an illegal organ harvesting clinic run by Dr. Swami. He and his assistants Murli, the rickshaw driver and Sakhu, the lottery ticket seller decide to spare Akash when Akash tells Sakhu has a Lord Shiva tattoo which he saw before being blind and it shocks the 3 as Akash was blind. The next morning, Akash tells everything about Murli too, Akash also tells them about the murder secret from which could earn them millions They kidnap Simi, stage her suicide scene, and blackmail Manohar. However, Murli and Sakhu double-cross Akash, tie him up with Simi, and plan to take the money for themselves. At the rendezvous, Manohar shoots Murli but is trapped in an elevator and accidentally shoots and kills himself. The money is revealed to be counterfeit.
Simi helps Akash free himself and he removes her blindfold. While he is trying to find an escape for the both of them, Simi frees herself and attacks him. Swami enters; after a brief fight, he and Akash knock Simi out, tie her up in the boot of a car, and drive away. Swami reveals that Simi has a rare blood type and that her organs would sell for millions; he also plans to use her corneas to restore Akash's sight. Simi awakens in the boot, and when Swami stops the car to sedate her again, she overpowers him and seizes the wheel. Akash, thinking Swami is still driving, pleads to release Simi.
Two years later at a gig in Kraków, Sophie finds Akash. Akash explains to her the whole story. In a flashback, we are shown that Simi drops Akash off and tries to run him over, but a hare hits the windshield of the car, causing Simi to lose control and die when the car crashes and bursts into flames. Sophie tells him he should have listened to Swami. Akash continues along, knocking a can away from his path with his walking stick, hinting that he did take Simi's cornea.

Cast

The cast is listed below:
  • Tabu as Simi Sinha
  • Ayushmann Khurrana as Akash Sarraf
  • Radhika Apte as Sophie
  • Anil Dhawan as Pramod Sinha
  • Zakir Hussain as Dr. Krishna Swami
  • Ashwini Kalsekar as Rasika Jawanda
  • Manav Vij as Inspector Manohar Jawanda
  • Chhaya Kadam as Sakhu
  • Pawan Singh as Murli
  • Mohini Kewalramani as Mrs. D'SA
  • Gopal K. Singh as Sub-Inspector Paresh Kadam
  • Rashmi Agdekar as Daani Sinha
  • Kabir Sajid Sheikh as Bandu
  • Rudrangshu Chakrabarti as Murli
  • Pratik Nandkumar More as Surya
  • Mahesh Rale as P. Kamdar
  • Abhishek Shukla as Animal Hunter
  • Jaydutt Vyas as Alurkar
  • Girdhar Swami

    Production

Development

Director-writer Sriram Raghavan saw , a 2010 French short film about a blind pianist, in 2013 at the recommendation of his friend, filmmaker Hemanth M Rao. Raghavan said although his film is different, the French film was its "basic germ". He wanted Rao to write a script based on the short but Rao was directing a film of his own. Raghavan then worked on Badlapur and had the "gist of the story". After reading about Kaabil, which is also about a blind man, he was about to start writing but stopped, thinking having two films about blind people would be "crazy". Raghavan later resumed the script, taking a different approach.
The idea of a blind pianist performing while a body is being dumped and a crime scene cleaned up fascinated Raghavan, who had written a similar scene for his previous film, Agent Vinod, in which a blind girl plays the piano while surrounded by mayhem. Raghavan wrote the script with Arijit Biswas, Yogesh Chandekar, Rao and Pooja Ladha Surti. He gave the story idea to Varun Dhawan while they were working on Badlapur but Dhawan became busy with other films and the script was left unfinished. Negotiations with Suriya and Harshvardhan Kapoor also fell through. Raghavan discussed the scenes with the writers, who reacted as viewers.
Raghavan and Biswas were unhappy while translating the dialogue from English to Hindi because they thought in English. Raghavan told Biswas to write the dramatic dialogue in Bengali, which was "at least the Indian idiom". Surti wrote another version of the dialogue because her Hindi was better than that of the others. Raghavan cited the 1996 film Fargo and the eponymous television series as an inspiration, calling them "realistic and yet ... bizarre". One of his friends was in a situation similar to one in the film; he then realised old Hindi films use "piano songs" and decided make the blind pianist the main character.

Casting

heard about the film from casting directors Mukesh Chhabra and Girdhar Swami. He contacted Raghavan, expressing interest in working on it. Raghavan conducted screen tests of the scene in which the protagonist wakes up blind: "There were two pieces – when you are acting blind and when you are actually blind, and we tried both. I wanted to see what the difference in his body language would be." Khurrana, who played the piano in the film, met several blind students and observed "how plays, conducts and moves his hands". Khurrana studied piano for four hours daily under Akshay Verma, a pianist based in Los Angeles, and did not use a body double in the film. He called it the "most challenging role" of his career. Khurrana was also trained by visually impaired musician Rahul Gajjal as part of the film.
Raghavan told Khurrana not to watch films with a blind protagonist and took him to the National School of the Blind. He said, "Since no two persons are the same, I picked up the nuances, learnt how to hold the stick and climb the stairs". Khurrana made omelettes and walked on the street blindfolded. He was given a pair of special lenses that impaired his vision by around 80 percent. His body language changed because he could no longer see properly. After wearing the black glasses, his vision was affected by 90 percent and he shot the entire film like that. Raghavan called Radhika Apte, who agreed to play Khurrana's love interest. Several scenes were improvised. Tabu was Raghavan's first choice for Simi. He did not brief her about scenes and they "kept developing as it went". Anil Dhawan played a former actor, a version of himself.
Raghavan said he wanted to make a "fun sort of thriller" to follow Badlapur. According to him, Andhadhun is not a whodunit; " ... The audience knows all along what's happening and why. It's the characters who don't." Raghavan and the film's director of photography K. U. Mohanan decided to "restrict everything to Akash's point of view" so the audience could see what Akash sees. There were no close-ups in the piano-playing scene, which was extensively rehearsed with several assistants to fit its timing into the four-minute piano piece. It was not rehearsed with the actors; Raghavan told them to "just do the scene" and gave them a time frame; "We didn't want it to look practiced; we needed that uncertainty". The film's first shot was rehearsed with Khurrana for three months. Raghavan called Andhadhun "a fun film in the macabre sense of the word", with moments of "wickedness and brutality".
Raghavan wanted the film to have an open ending and considered several options. Both the Viacom 18 and Matchbox Pictures production teams were apprehensive about the audience acceptance of an open ending but Raghavan persuaded them. Its working title was Shoot the Piano Player, which was changed because the producers felt an English title would "alienate people". The title is a play on the word andhadhund, which means reckless or relentless, and "a play on blind tune and trance". The film was edited by Surti, and Snigdha Karmahe, Pankaj Pol and Anita Donald were its production designers.