At some point during the production of Merry Christmas, somebody must have told director Sriram Raghavan that it wasn’t working. Unless, of course, he operates his sets like Sanjay Leela Bhansali, in which case, nobody would have dared. But assuming that he doesn’t, couldn’t someone have mustered the courage to let him know that the one thing his movie was hinging on — an undeniable, almost untameable chemistry between stars Katrina Kaif and Vijay Sethupathi — wasn’t being felt, at least on set?
Perhaps they would’ve assumed, or been reassured, that it would all make sense on the edit; that the random missing frames, the odd camerawork, the over-lit sets would feel less like mistakes and more like maverick creative choices. They had no reason to doubt Raghavan, after all. Essentially a movie about a first date gone horribly wrong, Merry Christmas builds towards a climax that, ahem, hinges entirely on the ability of its two protagonists to convince audiences that they’re ready to take a bullet for each other. Or, at least, go to jail. But there’s nothing about either performance that remotely suggests romance, forget true love.
Merry Christmas unfolds across one Christmas Eve in a bygone Mumbai, ‘when it was called Bombay’. It doesn’t exactly matter when this story takes place, because the period setting is partially for aesthetics and partially for plot reasons — it always helps in movies like this if the characters don’t have the ability to, say, Uber their way out of trouble. But when the loners Maria and Albert bump into each other (seemingly for the first time) at a restaurant, it sets into motion a chain of events that includes a dead body, kitschy wallpaper that seems like it was ripped right off the Vantara lobby, and a Sanjay Kapoor performance so unchained that it might as well have been directed by Ali Abbas Zafar.
Because Kaif and Sethupathi are certainly operating on a different register altogether, it makes sense for their performances to be slightly imperceptible. They are, after all, hiding something. At least that’s what the movie strongly wants you to believe during their initial interactions. “Do they know each other?” you wonder briefly, while you wait for the smallest spark to ignite the screen. “Is this like that Stanley Tucci role-playing movie? Are they just pretending to be strangers?”
Who knows? Because unlike other thrillers of this kind — thrillers that invite the viewer to ‘solve’ the mysteries along with the characters — Merry Christmas deliberately obfuscates, misleads, and most egregiously, lies to the audience in order to cover its own mistakes. This better be the reason why both Maria and Albert are watching Pinocchio in an early scene. Because it’s hard to tell what Raghavan is getting at with the scores of references that he’s squeezed into this thing.
For around 90 minutes, Maria and Albert talk — about their chequered pasts, her little daughter, and his deceased wife. Raghavan, who couldn’t extract believable chemistry out of real-life couple Kareena Kapoor and Saif Ali Khan in the year that they literally got married, wants nothing more than for us to believe that Maria and Albert are falling for each other, almost in spite of themselves. But try as hard as it might, the first hour or so of the film can’t replicate the effortless joys of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, or even its many clones. You could watch Celine and Jesse talk about something as seemingly irrelevant as sourdough starter, and their faces would communicate everything that we need to know about them. Such is the power of chemistry.
And while it’s obvious that Raghavan is aiming for a similar breeziness in Merry Christmas, the movie feels like it’s positively straining to win your affection. Its efforts are dashed almost immediately by the one-two punch of poor casting and terrible acting. It might have sounded like a fun idea in the writers’ room, but the two stars — independently talented as they might be — feel like the grating against each other on screen. Kaif’s unblemished face, which we see quite often in a tight close-up, offers an ironic contrast to Maria’s imperfections as a person. She’s asked to deliver a performance within a performance — it’s that rare kind of role that has defeated the best of them.
But instead of getting a helping hand, far too often, she finds herself being pushed into a corner by the witless writing. And stifled by the silliest sort of screenwriting — “Meri kahaani bhi saat saal pehle shuru hoti hai,” Maria says — scenes that are meant to feel loose and light-footed, unpredictable and impudent, ultimately feel like a poorly produced high school play. Featuring somebody else’s children.
Sethupathi, an actor whose talents blew everybody that watched Super Deluxe away, is practically catatonic as Albert, a convicted murderer out on parole. “Mere liye yeh teen ghante sapne ki tarah they,” he tells Maria. It’s an already stilted line that Sethupathi makes infinitely worse by delivering it with the energy of somebody who has just been familiarised with the concept of words. I might be wrong, but it seems like something fundamentally shifted inside him when he went from being just Vijay Sethupathi to the ‘Makkal Selvan’. Close your eyes and you wouldn’t be able to tell if you’re listening to him in Vikram, Farzi, Jawan, or here. Maybe it’s a Hindi thing.
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But it can’t all be the fault of the actors, can it? Raghavan approaches the material with all the delicacy of Dune: Part Two in Dolby Atmos. If the entire movie was going to sound like it was dubbed a week before picture lock, why shoot a separate version at all? You can sense his trepidation throughout the course of the film, which makes the critical error of favouring exposition over emotion. This includes reducing Maria’s abused daughter into essentially a plot device. “Will they get it?” he seems to be asking himself in every scene; “Do we need to make things clearer?” Unlike the recent Mr & Mrs Smith, which is about as excellent as something like this can be, Merry Christmas is under the impression that for its grand climactic ‘twist’ to work, we need to be fully familiar with every piece of the puzzle beforehand. We don’t. Plots are incidental in moody stories like this. But Merry Christmas seems to think that characters are incidental to the plot.
Post Credits Scene is a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters. Because there’s always something to fixate about once the dust has settled.