Merry Christmas

A few days after watching Merry Christmas, I’m still scratching my head trying to figure out why it worked for me.

The film is a slow burn, to the point where there isn’t really an end to the burning. You don’t see the quiet desperation of a character who has committed a crime and is now figuring out a way to get away with it. The tone is sweet, sad, at times playful but largely quiet. Even the big revelation is done with very little drama. The story and its setting would’ve been more suited to an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents — there isn’t enough plot to justify a two and a half hour running time.

And yet…

The first thing that would’ve occurred to everyone who saw the promos was: Vijay Sethupathi and Katrina Kaif? Oh, interesting! It’s not the most obvious casting choice; for it to work, you need to give it space to breathe. And that is what the entire first half of the film is: breathing space. The tentative chemistry that develops between the two of them over the course of a long night is worth the price of admission. Despite the unlikely nature of some of the proceedings, the delicate dance between the characters somehow manages to work because of how slowly it all unfolds.

It is also what makes the ending work. The film ends almost abruptly, but really, it respects the characters’ and the audience’s intelligence in the way it does. When a single, very Christmas-y word is uttered by an unlikely character, it unties the bow on a neatly wrapped up box. We realize, as do some of the characters, how the next half hour of the film would unfold. And because Sriram Raghavan trusts us to draw this conclusion, he ends things there by allowing one character to make a choice that gives the story closure.

This is a very interesting choice for the genre. Stories like these often end with characters getting their just desserts, or characters getting away with it. But closure? In a film where all the major characters feel caged in some form or another, a character chooses to be caged, and finds that the choice is itself surprisingly liberating. (It is also in this stretch that you see what Vijay Sethupathi is made of. In a wordless stretch scored to Vivaldi’s Winter, he shows us how much an actor can convey with such minimal explicit “acting”. It is a thing of beauty.)

This is an ending about characters and their emotions, not plot. There is no earthly reason why it should work but it does. It works because the languid first half has prepared us, if not to believe it, at least to want to believe it. A lot of screen romances have that quality — they work because you want the characters to end up where they do.

And then you step back and realize that, while you thought you were watching a slow-burn crime story with a romantic subplot, what you actually got was a love story with a dead body in it. That’s a better sleight of hand than any of the characters manage in the film.