If you are curious, Berlin is a German coffee house situated in Delhi’s Connaught Place in Atul Sabharwal’s meditative spy-thriller of the same name. The film revolves around the interrogation of a deaf-mute suspect Ashok (Ishwak Singh) by a sign-language expert Pushkin Verma (Aparshakti Khurana) at the behest of an intimidating intelligence officer Sondhi (Rahul Bose). For Atul, the idea for the film lit up at a Mumbai cafe, a Lokhandwala joint employing deaf-mute staff and a place where a film gets pitched at every other table.
“One of the waiters there was quite a chirpy fellow,” he says. “He tried to make conversation with you without caring if you knew sign language or not.” The eagerness of this attendant gave birth to Ashok.
“I started thinking, what if one of these waiters was a person wanting to enter the film industry?” The setting remained the same but its characteristics changed. In the film, Berlin is not an innocuous cafe filled with film industry aspirants. It is a hole-in-the-wall establishment where intelligence officers across agencies trade secrets with deaf-mute servers being the ‘walls’ between tables.
One of these attendants is Ashok, who, intrigued by this world of spies, tries to uncover a secret and ultimately gets too close to the sun. The film sprouted from Atul’s short-story , told from the deaf-mute waiter’s perspective. “A film from Ashok’s POV would have to be a silent one.
The short story was thus unfilmable,” he says. Hence, we see the film from the eyes of Pushkin, a meek sign-language teacher, oddly named after Russian poet and playwright Alexander Pushkin. “I had a classmate who was called Pushkin Verma,” shares Atul while adding, “I was intrigued.
Why would an Indian parent name his child after a Russian writer?” Atul grew up in Agra in the 1980s, when there was a rapid cultural exchange between India and the erstwhile Soviet Union. “Doordarshan used to air a series on Russian gymnast Nadia Comaneci. A lot of East European films were also shown on TV,” he says.
“There were mobile libraries that stocked books by many Soviet publishers.” Atul’s family was in the shoe business, and there was trade between sellers in Agra (known for its footwear industry) and in the Soviet Union. “Any decision that was made in Delhi affected the business my family was in.
It shaped the conversations at home,” he says. Atul pitched the idea of Berlin to many actors before zeroing in on Rahul Bose, Aparshakti Khurana and Ishwak Singh (“They seemed the most excited to hear it”). Aparshakti and Ishwak learnt sign language for four to six months before getting on set.
The interrogation scenes were particularly tricky to shoot for Aparshakti as he had to deliver dialogues in sign language and verbally. “Sometimes in sign language the sentence construction is strange,” says the actor. “For example, if I have to say ‘let’s go upstairs and do this interview’, in sign language I might say ‘upstairs’ first and ‘do this interview’ later.
My lines I had to speak straight, in sign language it was a different format and on top of that I had to remember Ishwak’s lines too. It was a tough task.” Aparshakti also shared another difficulty of “pacing” he faced while shooting for the film.
Berlin is a slow-burn, sombre feature, and the actor said he had to calm himself to be in sync with the mood of the film. “I am quite a livewire,” he shares. “I mean I have been an overexcited radio jockey.
I had to really scold myself and control my energy.” Last week, Atul took to social media and shared a picture of a handwritten list of films that he re-watched before getting into the making of Berlin. There were some spy/surveillance regulars like Francis Ford Coppola’s (1974), Jean-Pierre Melville’s (1969) and Alfred Hitchcock’s (1946) but, strangely, there were also some Hindi dramas like (1980) and (1986).
“In , a differently-abled teacher teaches differently-abled kids. I took inspiration for Pushkin from there. In New Delhi Times, a different kind of Delhi is shown, of newsrooms and diplomatic quarters.
I wanted to get a sense of that,” says Atul. The director also explains how interviews with some Narcotics Control Bureau officers that he conducted while researching for his 2010 TV series Powder, helped during Berlin. “They had shared some manuals in which there was a chapter titled ‘How to do surveillance?’” he says.
So, this time, did he meet any spies to understand their way of working? “How to!” he says with a laugh. “That will blow their cover.”.
