Teresa Reviews Charlie Chopra (2023)
Teresa reviews Charlie Chopra and the Mystery of Solang Valley (2023) and it found a way of confounding Indian audiences used to elaborate fight and dance scenes: a woman addressing the camera.
(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel
Fidelity to text: 4 decanters
Remarkably close, despite much added complexity to the characters’ relationships and an additional murderer.
Quality of film: 4 decanters
We loved it. We’d have loved it more if editing had been a bit smoother, and I knew who Maya was.
Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.
Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.
After watching a few Indian films, I don’t know if there’s anything typical about any Indian cinema in any of India’s 22 official languages, other than you can expect at least one musical interlude whether the plot needs it or not.
Charlie Chopra is the first time I’ve seen a character (Charlie herself) break the fourth wall and address the audience. If you’ve seen the Deadpool films you know what I’m talking about. Like Deadpool, Groucho Marx, or Bugs Bunny who also routinely addressed the audience, Charlie knows she’s being watched. She even makes a joke about it! No one else knows they’re being seen.
Judging from the reviews, a character addressing them threw Indian audiences. Characters breaking out into song and dance, even in the middle of a noirish mystery (Aar Yar Paar)? No problem. But a woman humorously addressing them about men and love? Madness!
Think of breaking the fourth wall as a cinematic conceit similar to an unneeded musical interlude commenting and enhancing the action. It’s a wink, wink, nudge, nudge to the audience, letting them in on a joke and enlarging the world of the movie.
The Sittaford Mystery (1931) is one of Agatha’s earlier mysteries, written after she met Max Mallowan and remade her life. It’s a tight, complex novel with callbacks to Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles with supernatural aspects that can be explained when you remove the concealing claptrap. Conan Doyle even gets name-checked by Charles Enderby, eager reporter looking for a frontpage story.
It’s odd that Sittaford hasn’t been adapted by the BBC. It’s so English! Class differences, mysterious strangers, retired colonels, secrets heaped as high as the snows outside, interrelationships you should expect but didn’t because England is a very small country, and murder in the village. Instead, ITV inserted Miss Marple into Sittaford (2006) and what a travesty that was. Les Petits Meurtres, season 2, adapted it but don’t expect much fidelity to text with them.
Leave it to writer and director Vishal Bhardwaj to take a quintessential English golden age mystery and make it Indian and modern and still faithful to the text.
The séance ends badly when the beautiful young Wasima Hussain is possessed by the spirit of Lady Rose. Lady Rose was a ghost? Who lived in Solang Valley? At any rate, that’s her portrait on the wall. The shaman wasn’t surprised although everyone else was when Wasima began shrieking about how someone was being murdered that very moment. The group work out that it’s the wealthy patriarch of the clan, Brigadier General Rawat (Captain Trevalyan) who chose not to attend the séance as he’s on the outs with the family. His best friend and operator of his ski resort, Col. Barua (Major Burnaby), insists on braving the blizzard and hiking two hours through deep snow to see if Rawat is okay.
He and Rawat’s manservant, nervously hanging around outside the home, break in and discover that Rawat is not okay. He’s had his head bashed in and, like Wasima shrieked, blood is everywhere. Because of the deep snow, it’s unlikely the murderer was some random housebreaker. The murderer is someone much closer.
Evidence points to Jimmy Nautiyal (James Pearson), Rawat’s weak, slightly shady, and desperate for money nephew. He visited Rawat that very evening and left behind his hotel key to prove it.
But when Jimmy’s arrested, his girlfriend, Charlie Chopra (Emily Trefusis) arrives on the scene determined to discover who really dunnit and get her boyfriend out of jail. She’s not an amateur detective, however. She was taught by her mother, who disappeared when Charlie was a teen. She left behind a mystery and a cigar which Charlie likes to sniff while contemplating clues.
Charlie meets Sitaram Bisht (Charles Enderby), eager reporter, and meets her match. Sitaram knows who she is: her face is on the jam jar he dips into every morning (she’s the face of her boyfriend’s business selling organic treats). He interviews her without revealing his profession, but she quickly learns who he is when everything she tells him ends up on the evening news.
As you’d expect, they start investigating but for differing reasons. Sitaram wants to become a star reporter and hey! she’s stunning. Charlie, like Emily, knows her Jimmy. He’s not the murdering type. She plunges into working out the convoluted connections among the relatives, visitors, strangers staying in the ski resort, the local Airbnb owners, and, most importantly, how they all feel about Brigadier Rawat.
They hate him. Well, most of them hate him. A very nice touch in Charlie Chopra is that you get to know Rawat. In the novel, he’s murdered without ever getting to speak. Here, in one flashback after another, you see Rawat use his money to manipulate the family, prepare to marry a young, Scottish hottie and disinherit his family, put the screws to the Airbnb operators, toss Col. Barua out into the snow, and refuse to pay for the desperately needed kidney transplant for his nephew. And this isn’t the entire list! Rawat has his moments, but his true character soon becomes clear. He’s loyal to friends and family only when it suits him. When he stops benefiting, you’re tossed out into the snow to freeze.
As Charlie investigates, she and reporter-boy unearth more connections, but not before some shocks. The Scottish hottie dies in a suspicious skiing accident, meaning her unborn baby can’t inherit. This tightens the circle of suspicion around the family. Then Charlie discovers, in the most public way¬ that dear Jimmy has been cheating on her with the mysterious Maya. Charlie is distraught enough to cut her hair off. She still, however, wants to solve the case because Chopras don’t quit, even when the client is a lowdown cheating dog.
One attempted murder on Charlie later, and she solves it. It was Col. Barua, now conveniently dead of suicide. But she worries about that séance. Who was Wasima channeling? Why, a suspect hidden in plain sight, who had even more reason than Col. Barua to murder Rawat and who had the skillset to make the séance happen as planned.
And it works! Every loose end tied up neatly, even though Charlie’s lost her boyfriend and the Rawat extended family is in ruins.
Agatha wrote plenty of novels where plucky young women solve mysteries. Vishal Bhardwaj should film more movies about Charlie using them and then maybe, we’ll learn what happened to her mother.
