It’s not often you go into a film blind — and come out blinder. But Dial 1975 is that rare Hindi thriller. When you have an intriguing logline like “a gripping race to control India’s first wireless telephone takes place during the Emergency,” it takes some doing to make the furthest possible iteration of it. There were times I had to look up the premise again to make sure I wasn’t watching the wrong film. A semblance of a storyline pops up every now and then, and I can’t be sure, but it’s a pot-of-gold plot featuring an ex-soldier-turned-baddie (Kay Kay Menon), an ex-con-turned-goodie (Pravessh Rana), the goodie’s girlfriend (Kirti Kulhari), a bag full of cash (currency notes), missing tapes, a German guy with the precious invention, and a battle between government loyalists and rebel factions to procure said phone.
Instead of supplying each other, though, these arcs seem to be fighting with each other. Nobody wins. It’s all so incoherent and patched-up that you can tell a belated framing device has been added for the viewer to follow. Believe it or not, it’s the voice-over of the phone. And it says pained things like “I was invented to reduce the distance, but I started to be used as a weapon…”. The dog of Dil Dhadakne Do is defeated. The annoying piggy-bank of Gullak has been annihilated.
You can also tell that Dial 1975 was made a while ago. It’s not that the film-making is dated, though the staging does itself no favours; the mysterious conversations between two officers (played by the late Tom Alter and Uday Chandra) unfold like moments of a stage-play gone rogue. The film opens as a character-based drama of a soldier who kills his own troops in a moment of disappointment during the Indo-China war, and eventually turns into a PTSD monster. Which would have been an interesting-enough film. He becomes an errant bullet for anyone who uses him as a hired gun.
But the screenplay chooses a hotpotch of tones and political energy. Multiple players and ideologies set out to weaponise the phone, but the movie focuses too much on the crowded mechanics of this race. The meaning of it all — a silenced country desperate for a new technology that might transmit their voices — is mysteriously lost in translation. Unless the phone itself reminds you of where it’s chilling. In fact, everything is so mysterious that it’s all subtext, no text. Some of it is wicked: like room number 2002 in a hotel next to 1993, prompting the manager to say “the country is like this only”. But such touches only call for attention in a script that misreads the genre. Other than the chase for a tapped phone chat from the Prime Minister’s office in June 1975, at no point does the Emergency feel like a lived-in character.
The showpiece sequence in the film revolves around a stand-off in the hotel room (2002 of course) between two men that soon become four people. It’s so long that it could be a diploma short on its own. While they point their guns at each other, the film-making slows down and tries to milk the tension. The metaphors fly thick and fast: Newton, crocodile attacks, lions and deer are invoked. They’re too busy taunting one another to pull the trigger. Finally, when the bullets come, it’s almost like the scene shoots itself in the head because it lost interest. There are more set-pieces like this; only the makers seem to be aware of the bigger picture, and all we can do is hope to catch on. The acting is uneven too, because the personality of most characters keeps changing from one shot to another. Kay Kay Menon can do these kooky-psycho roles in his sleep; the rest of the cast deliver lines and perform actions. That’s the kindest I can be. Which is to say, there’s a potentially engaging Emergency-era thriller somewhere in Dial 1975, but it’s so deeply buried that the movie feels like a blocked number in the pre-cellphone era.