STRANGERS (2007) Producer : Uday Tiwari Director : Anand Rai Cast : Kay Kay Menon, Jimmy Shergill, Nandana Sen, Sonali Kulkarni Special Appearance : Kitu Gidwani UK Release Date 14 December 2007

SYNOPSIS

An overnight journey, from Southampton to London, in a business class compartment is comfortable and expensive and the premise where two of the film’s protagonists, complete strangers to each other, meet, talk and decide that they would kill each other’s wife to rid each other of the hell they are trapped in. The claustrophobia of the space of the compartment and the fact that the two people are not juxtaposed with each other but somehow meant to be there together is both exciting and repulsive.

Mr.Rai is a successful management giant, who on the face of it, is leading the life that everybody dreams of; Rahul, the flamboyant writer with a flop career is an existence that can only be an example but never an ideal. Their conversations are interspersed with flashbacks, which reveal essential clues into these complex yet real characters.

It is at this time when on one hand, we see the trauma that Rai was living through after his son’s untimely death and his wife Nandini subsequent insanity. On the other hand is the beautiful relationship between Rahul and Preity that starts on an almost fantastical note with a hopeful Rahul and a loving Preity and ends with Preity turning cold towards him because of his obsessive ranting after the collapse of his career and their ending up living under the same roof as strangers.

Every moment between Rai and Rahul adds a piece to the big jigsaw puzzle and we see how every character is playing a game of wits with each other, a game that should be won at all costs not to establish a monarchy or absolute victory but to ensure their individual survival.

The second half of the film is about laying the cards out in the open. It is about the clandestine affair between Rai and Preity, a relationship borne out of both affinities and a need to find a refuge at the time when the relationship between Rahul and Preity has collapsed and Rai had given up on life. The battered individuals find solace in each other after a long ordeal with their individual realities.

What follows is deceit and living by the instinct for all of them. Rationality filters away painfully from their relationships and life and Rai and Preity decide that they would get Rahul to kill Rai’s wife Nandini and be framed for the murder. An act that would play on their conscience forever and yet is the only possible way to eliminate the reason that would keep them apart. But their plan takes ugly twists and turns and their basic presumption that Rahul was oblivious of their relationship backfires and the backdrop of a thriller becomes a building block of two sincere and complete love stories.