Of Pursuits in Irrfan's Puzzle

It’s an incredibly beautiful feeling to make the journey of not knowing anything about a movie to fall in love with it in a brief span of time. It used to happen to me when I was young and I used to just download any movie without knowing much about it. Maybe, I liked its title or maybe, I liked the performance of the lead in some another movie and that would become my reason to give it a try. Yeah, I was a lot more imaginative back then. Or possibly, just way too jobless.

Lately, bored with the Netflix and the Prime illusion of having too many movies to watch yet not a single decent one, I decided to go back the old way. When you know almost nothing about a film, you begin with zero expectations. If anything good comes out of it, It feels like a time well spent. That’s almost how I stumbled upon the 2018 film Puzzle. I had never heard about it 24 hours ago. The name piqued my curiosity and so did the presence of Irrfan, whose acting I am kind of craving for after his passing away that left many of us shocked.

However, one thing I did differently with Puzzle was that I watched its trailer. I generally don’t do it but maybe it was the craving for a glimpse of Irrfan that made me do it or maybe it was wanting to know a little more about the film. But the moment the trailer ended, I went straight to the place where I could get the movie from and waited for it to finish downloading. I guess this also made the movie-watching experience of the pre-Netflix era a special one. To watch something after you’ve waited for it to download is a strangely beautiful feeling, something I have come to realize only after having movies on my fingertips.

And that’s how Puzzle began. After hours of waiting. It was nice to see the familiar face of David Denman in there, the guy who I knew from the show The Office. But I’d be honest, that from the first scene, I was waiting for Irrfan to appear on the screen. That said, the beginning of the movie, despite seeming a little rushed gave enough beautiful visuals for me to hang on to it. Not that I had plans to leave it midway. At least, not before watching a bit of Irrfan. But by the time Agnes’ puzzle partner opened the door to welcome her in, I was hooked. Not only the visuals but the story too had begun to work its magic on me. The trailer had given away quite a bit about the story. So, much of the movie-watching experience was to see how that plot pans out.

It panned out pretty well, to say the least, thanks to strong performances by everyone and the soul-soothing cinematography of Chris Norr. The latter deserves more than a mention for his cinematography, which involves so much of play with light and darkness that it often makes you pause and admire the frame. And there are way too many frames to admire in the film as anyone who watches it would notice.

But it was Irrfan who drew me in, making the rest of the movie feel almost unimportant despite it being a fairly beautiful film in itself and his role being just an extended cameo. As much as I would have loved to see more layers in his character, I guess at this point, I was just so happy to watch him do his thing. Act effortlessly. He charmed with his eyes in most scenes. They aided him so well in scenes where he needed to come across as humorous. There are no great comic dialogues. But his expressions and his smile, they manage to tickle you in scenes as innocuous as those where he calls Agnes ‘Agnesh Mata’ for no rhyme or reason. There are scenes where he looks dashing, again without making any effort to do so. There was hardly any scene where my mind didn’t whisper, “What a loss.”

The best of the movie coincides with the best of Irrfan in a scene where he explains his puzzle partner why a rich man like him is inexplicably obsessed with the world of puzzles.

“Life is messy. It doesn’t make any goddamn sense. Life’s just random. There’s nothing we can do to control anything. But when you complete a puzzle, when you finish it, you know that you’ve made all the right choices. No matter how many wrong pieces you tried to fit in the wrong places but at the very end, everything makes one perfect picture. What other pursuits can give you that kind of perfection? Faith? Ambition? Wealth? Love? No. Not even Love can do that, Mata.”

While you try to make sense of that, especially in the context of the actor’s untimely death, a piece of soft piano music serenades you, as it does in most of the scenes. The film has been served well by the background score and nowhere does it hinder your interaction with the story by being too overbearing. It flows just perfectly at the pace of the story.

The movie, of course, isn’t about Irrfan. He just serves as the catalyst in the life of an introverted housewife whose life till then had revolved around her family, played wonderfully by a superbly talented Kelly MacDonald. It charts her journey of exploration of her own world, starting as a meek wife who doesn’t even bring to notice the disturbance caused to her sleep by her husband’s snoring to taking bold decisions about her life. She finds her own voice in the journey and makes it count when it comes to decisions pertaining to her son’s life. We see Agnes grow as a person, a growth that causes much tumult in her life. But when has any growth taken place without trepidation? There’s a delicious scene towards the end when in the all-important final of the Puzzle Championship, Irrfan’s character calls her a rebel for going against what he taught her in the lead-up to the big day. MacDonald owns the scene with her smile, which you hitherto hadn’t seen coming, just like her streak of rebellion.

As the movie progresses, the missing parts of the puzzle begin to fall into place for Agnes, while one, that of love, goes missing. But maybe, that’s a small price to pay in the journey she undertakes. Or maybe we missed the point feeling sad for the loss of love in her life. Maybe, self-love was, in fact, the missing piece of the puzzle she had been looking for from the first scene. Who knows? The ending of the film, despite not being open-ended, does leave you with a vague mixture of feelings that are difficult to comprehend easily. And your mind wanders back to what Irrfan had said in his monologue.

“What other pursuits can give you that kind of perfection? Faith? Ambition? Wealth? Love? No. Not even Love can do that, Mata.”