If failures are more useful and interesting than the mediocre, what use could we make of at least some of those elements in Vishal Bhardwaj’s recent Netflix spy thriller Khufiya (Secret) which make the film flounder? Despite its low-key tone, the ambitions that the film sets for itself are nothing less than monumental, aided by the new confidence that a platform like Netflix is able to infuse in the culture industry. First of all, it tries to engage with the hazy two extremes of the representational spectrum at one go: the microscopic interior represented by sexuality at one end, and the unfathomable maze of global geopolitics at the other. Khufiya even seems to establish a correlation between the two domains, suggesting that the macabre violence that geopolitical villainy perpetuates is a reflection, if not the direct result, of the failure to be transparent at a very personal level, about and to oneself. The other major experiment is its casting of Tabu — whose current star persona derives from the many femme fatales she has been playing in Hindi films — in the role of the spy investigator. It reverses the typical gender roles in thriller genres in which the male investigator surveils the world’s excesses embodied by the femme-fatale who becomes the object of his gaze.
Khufiya’s parallel forays into the deeply personal and the all-encompassing geopolitical don’t offer us much other than the familiar platitudes delivered in the form of a few lines that Tabu’s Krishna Mehra tells a politically uninitiated Charu, played by Wamiqa Gabbi, at different points: “Everyone has one’s pain and one’s scars”; “this bloody violence will never cease as long as the world remains divided into religions and nations”, and so on. Yet, this is interesting because it is as though the film presumes an audience possessing absolute knowledge due to which suspenses and surprises might not work. The very opening lines of the film delivered by Krishna Mehra give away both its ‘secrets’, intentionally of course: that the protagonist might have unconventional sexuality, and that everyone is a puppet in the hands of an unrepresentable force/CIA.
This viewer that the film presupposes, familiar with the many behind-the-scenes genres like the real footage documentaries and the serialised dramas based on true events proliferating on platforms like Netflix, is trained to not take appearances for granted. This predisposition, however, does not equip them with a real knowledge about what lies beneath the surface. Such absolute knowledge is devoid of representational specificity or content in general. Its effectiveness lies rather in its ability to function as a ready frame to relate to the world and come to terms with its absurdities, taking the place of the old moral-symbolic frameworks. In fact, the film incorporates in it a projection of this viewer figure in the form of the protagonist’s 19 year old son Vikram (Meet Vohra) whose one persistent demand to his parents, especially his mother, is to be transparent. He knows his mother to be consistently lying to him about her profession and her relationship with his father, though he doesn’t know the truth. He is the one to whom Krishna Mehra has to come out in the end; otherwise the character is not of much consequence to the plot.
Spy thrillers usually attempt to offer an updated grand narrative about international relations, global politics and war strategies, however distortional such views may be coming from mainstream cinema. When they can’t strive towards accuracy in representing the complexity of the theme, they compensate for it with the genre’s typical spectacles of infiltration and ambush, showcasing new techniques and technologies at their disposal, ranging from hi-tech media tools of surveillance and spying to high efficiency military machinery and strategies. Khufiya remains indifferent to such genre promises. Despite the ubiquity of cameras with zoom lenses and microchipped surveillance kits, the film merely expects you to take for granted the ease with which private lives are constantly monitored by the state and agencies, rather than offering a spectacle of advanced surveilling machinery. Instead, the unrepresentability of geopolitics is given a figuration in the film in its acknowledgement of the blurry undefinable nature of sexuality. Perhaps, this explains the place of the protagonist’s sexuality as a theme in the film — it is as though the point was to say that both the inner and outer domains are analogous to each other in their unrepresentability.
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It is an ambitious move to choose to tell the story from the locus of the unsteady subject that the protagonist Krishna Mehra embodies due to her unconventional sexuality. Half the job is done when Bhardwaj casts his muse Tabu in the role, asking us to identify with her as the surveyor of the outer domain. Due to her star persona, supplemented with the outright disclosure about her sexuality as a contested domain, we expect her to lose her way or to lead herself astray. In conventional spy thrillers, we have seen the male agent as hero undergoing a process of self-doubt or a loss of faith in the nation on whose behalf he must act, as absurdly alienating dictates of capitalism and geopolitics compel nations to engage in tussles and wars in which morality has no place. Like Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) in Skyfall (2012) or Jim (John Abraham) in Pathaan (2023), the antagonist in the spy thriller can function as the mirror reflection of the hero’s own moral dilemmas and disquiet. But eventually he is brought back into the fold, restoring our faith in at least a grain of sanity and morality prevailing in the world. Tabu’s Krishna Mehra, who internalises this self-questioning gaze as she is haunted by her son’s rejection, however, cannot come back into the fold because of her sexuality. Yet, whenever the film is desperate for a stable vantage point, Tabu as the star emerges, by setting aside the hysteria she embodies, to do the reassuring gestures that stars typically do — like intervening divinely to prevent matters from descending into chaos or to anchor us within a moral-patriotic perspective when characters feel paralysed by insights.
As an experiment in the genre of the spy thriller, Khufiya allows us to think about the interventions that platforms like Netflix are looking to make in cinema and the culture industry. It appears to be an attempt in bringing a mainstream genre closer to the tone and aesthetic economy of the middlebrow film or the old parallel cinema, effectively reducing risks but still trying to offer gratifications that are on par with what the typical genre film strived to deliver. It also tells us about the new viewer-subject that these platforms groom by taking over the reformist role that the nation state and its institutions once assumed. Bhardwaj was a prominent figure among those directors in the Hindi film industry who tried to imagine a locus for the figure of the post-liberalisation subject by situating him or her in the emergent global economic-cultural landscape while giving this subject a historic specificity at the same time. Sadly, Khufiya’s ambitions are firmly set on achieving a total perspective, only to fall back on the intellectually satisfying realism of unrepresentability.
Jenson Joseph teaches at DA-IICT Gandhinagar, Gujarat. Views are personal.
