The hired killer in Baby Do Die Do is a woman. She is deaf and mute to boot. She can neither hear anything that anybody says nor spit out her rage in the form of words. She executes her chosen targets in utter silence with an umbrella that is actually a gun.
Pretty much like the umbrella in a rain-soaked Mumbai, nothing is what it seems. The pivotal elements in Baby Do Die Do are intriguing all right but do they give the film an edge that serves its purpose? They do only sporadically.
Huma Qureshi (who has also produced the film with her brother Saqib Saleem) fronts Baby Do Die Do with the ‘quiet’ confidence that the role calls for. She is unwaveringly consistent. The film is anything but.
For starters, the film isn’t as startling as the logline might suggest. Back in 1999, the Pang Brothers made Bangkok Dangerous, about a deaf-mute assassin whose thoughts are expressed by an inner voice on the soundtrack.
More recently, Bill Skarsgard was cast as a deaf hitman trained by a shadowy shaman after his family is wiped out in a post-apocalyptic city in Boy Kills World. Both were men. That, and a few other aspects of the plot, make Baby Do Die Do different.
The action is located in the murky world of lawbreaking realtors and ruthless land grabbers whose naked greed and murderous intent are meant to highlight Mumbai’s housing crisis. Too many people, too little space: that is the drift of the tale.
Allusions to the situation surfaces now and then but the problem that the film wants us to get a clear sense of merely serves as a backdrop rather than as something more than a mere narrative flashpoint.
A hoarding put up by an infrastructure developer dominates the skyline. Forget the past, tomorrow is here, it reads. What it does not say is: today is scary – a battle is on between land sharks and slum dwellers, constantly pushing up the numbers of those that are at the receiving end, people without the means to survive the ordeal.
The film’s overwrought title is bafflingly inscrutable to begin with, but once the audience is let in on the fact that it is drawn from the name of the female protagonist, Baby Karmarkar (Kar-Mar-Kar), one cannot but be a touch bemused, if not wholly convinced about the laboured wordplay.
While the atmospherics are impressive thanks to Tojo Xavier’s cinematography, logic hangs by a thin thread in Baby Do Die Do. It swings rather awkwardly back and forth between gritty crime drama and playful black comedy.
It seeks to confuse the audience by over-mystifying the muddled world of the female protagonist and the role of a dead sister’s voice that she ‘hears’ before, during and after a kill. In the bargain, the film struggles to gain sustained emotional frisson.
The verbal cues provided by a disembodied voice guide the titular character through situations that get riskier with each kill. They also serve to link one thing to another as the ungainly plot unfolds. “Shuru se start karte hain – jis raat ko mera murder hua tha (First things first, let us start with the night of my murder),” are the first words spoken in the film.
They are intoned by a teenage girl who has been strangled to death in an abandoned luxury hotel by a man whose face is concealed by a handkerchief. Twenty years on, the dead girl’s twin, Baby, silent but armed and dangerous, seeks vengeance. The spirit of the deceased sister continues to hover over the surviving sibling.
The dead girl pieces together the story of her own killing while filling us in with details about her sister’s subsequent life. In the run-up to the climax, Baby Do Die Do returns to the murder but by then the film no longer shocks or surprises, having fallen into a dull, predictable pattern of murders, violent scrambles and attempted reprisals.
Shorn of explosive action sequences and overt grandstanding of the kind that actioners centred on angry cops and unstoppable assassins usually resort to, the film, written and directed by Nachiket Samant (Single Salma, which also starred Qureshi, and Comedy Couple, top-lined by Saqib Saleem), admittedly does a great deal else in its bid to turn the genre on its head.
In a world of shady builders, land sharks and smarmy property agents who stop at nothing to eliminate troublemakers, Baby isn’t the only woman who calls the shots. On her trail is Mumbai police officer Anjum Khan (Seema Pahwa), who has Inspector Tawde (late Ashish Waring) to do her bidding. Hum log police hain, hero nahin hain (We are cops, not heroes), the DCP asserts. Cops in Hindi movies never say such things.
The two are surrounded by men who, barring one, Amandeep Singh Siddhu (Rachit Singh), who falls in love with and marries Baby, are despicable humans. Baby has a foster father (Chunky Panday) – he is addressed as Papa by all and sundry – who exploits the anger simmering within her.
The kills are ordered by Zafar Katkar (Sikander Kher), who has built a skyscraper that nobody wants a part of because his sordid reputation precedes him. He brooks no opposition. He lets Baby loose on anybody who tries to block his plans.
One of them, Mikky Murjhani, is played by Himanshu Malik, who, like Baby, leads a double life. Married to an ambitious woman (Vidya Malvade) who lets him be, he frequents a gay club, the site of the film’s only lip-synched song, Alpha Q, enacted with gusto by Saqib Saleem. It is a trippy item number that plays out without a single woman in sight.
The sight of men being objectified is certainly a striking departure from Hindi cinema norm but it might have worked better had it been more organic and not so obviously in-your-face as an act aimed at dismantling the established order.
The man in Baby’s life, Siddhu, too, makes it a point to remind us that he cooks, does household chores and isn’t toxic at all. He lives up to the claims but the state of being too good to be true does not do much good to the character. It robs him of any scope for angularities.
The unusual plot premise and a female-led narrative should have elevated Baby Do Die Do. It doesn’t, certainly not to the level that the makers would have hoped for. It kills much of its own promise, squandering it on superficial trappings. It dies more than it does.
