Black White & Gray Displays Imagination While Showcasing the Chasms of Narratives in Today’s World

There’s something off about Pushkar Mahabal and Hemal Thakkar’s Black White & Gray from the very beginning. A pronounced foreign accent asking questions from behind a camera, to cops about an unsolved murder case that we’re told took place in Nagpur, in 2020.

The talking heads (a sub-inspector and an assistant sub-inspector) seem rehearsed in their responses to questions – almost like they’re acting badly. I wondered if they made the people repeat their answers more than once, which caused the lack of spontaneity.

The voice-over featuring the ‘types of India’ sounded almost too generic and lazy by a foreigner. Even the cutting between the fictitious recreations and the interviews felt almost too neat and narrativised, and not something that was discovered in the edit. And then it took me till the start of episode four to pause and properly read the show’s disclaimer, addressing it all as a work of ‘fiction’.

Like the fictitious recreations featuring two web-series stars, even the ‘documentary’ portions are staged using unknown faces. Which is when the clumsy staging of the scenes – the rehearsed nature of the responses began to make sense, the alias of ‘Daniel Gray’ (sounding made-up) begins to make a lot more sense. Mahabal, who has also directed the six-part series, makes quite a few interesting choices with the format – digging into what appears to be one of those curtly-reported 150-word stories buried in newspapers.

Subterranean textures and ellipses

It’s a relatively straight-forward story when thought about in linear fashion – but what’s fascinating is the subterranean textures and ellipses discovered by Mahabal and Thakkar because of their form of storytelling.

To draw a parallel, Black White & Gray is that new kid in school – who might not look impressive at first, but the more you hear their quips during everyday exchanges, you begin to see beyond their ordinary facade.

Mahabal and Thakkar use the form of a true-crime documentary about an ‘unsolved crime’ to unearth a nefarious social order that criminalises love, weaponises identity and lurks around in the creepy, deserted national highways – which might as well be another planet in the dead of the night.

A boy and a girl (in their 20s) check into a seedy hotel outside Nagpur for a night of passion. However, things go south pretty quickly – and soon four murders are pinned on the boy, who has fled from the city. Mahabal and Thakkar’s show tells the story through recreated portions – starring Mayur More and Palak Jaiswal.

Meanwhile, the show also cuts to a deliberately more pared-down style of shooting, where a foreign journalist appears to be interviewing the ‘real’ boy — played by Sanjay Kumar Sahu. Even though it’s all fictitious, one of the greater joys of this series is being unable to tell what is real, what is fictitious, what is an objective fact, and what is a narrative? And how does an observer from the outside differentiate the truth from all this?

The telling is what separates Mahabal and Thakkar’s shows from the many genre pieces that have inundated the OTT space in recent years. And how nifty the transitions from fact, opinion, fact coloured by point-of-view; a commentary on the many versions of the same incident that are available for people on social media today. And the dozen spins one reads on the same incident, hence, making a case for at least half a dozen credible alternate realities; depending on what facts one gravitates towards.

The boy is the son of a driver, who works for the girl’s father. There is an inherent class-divide between the two, making their escapade that much more political than they might have hoped for. Her father is an MLA (played by Anant Jog) and a local strongman in Nagpur, who doesn’t file official complaints about his missing daughter, but dispatches his own hounds to track the couple down, and ‘take care’ of the business.

I liked how Mahabal leans into the stereotypes of the characters they’re embodying, and method-casting someone a Versova production would hire without blinking. For example: Jog is almost a no-brainer for the part of a ruthless MLA in Nagpur, who gruffly shuts his wife up on the phone. Jaiswal, with her made-in-a-metro sophistication, looks nothing like someone who has grown up in a Maharashtrian household in Nagpur.

Mayur More, the face of Kota factory, is exactly the face of a lower middle-class ‘nice guy’, troubled by the corruption of a society that views him differently. It’s worth noting that More’s character is how Sahu views himself as – a victim of the powerlessness of being a lower middle-class boy, trapped in tragic circumstances.

Even within this, I was surprised by the casting of Deven Bhojani and Tigmanshu Dhulia – who play the characters of a hit-man and a cop respectively. Bhojani, who has made a career of playing the cute, chubby, harmless relative in most shows — brings an eerie silence to his role as a fixer for a local politician.

Similarly, Dhulia — a significantly more perceptive actor than director in my eyes, brings unpredictability to officer Chauhan, who has just had an eye surgery and is on his way from Hyderabad to Nagpur by road.

Simplistic narratives

Black White & Gray, despite its unimaginative title, displays imagination while showcasing the chasms of narratives in today’s world. The simplistic narratives of conservative cops, who engage in moral-policing a girl entering a hotel to have sex with a man she likes. They view it as a case where she was coerced by a boy from the lower middle-class.

They attribute everything tragic about the night to the boy’s desperation. The boy, in turn, shares his side of the story by claiming how no one was suspicious about all the evidence and discrepancies ignored by the law enforcement to pin the blame on him. Could it be a boy who is aware of a corrupt system, which can become his crutch to claim innocence?

The fixer calmly confesses that he stabbed a driver and put him out of his misery, who he claims, was in his final moments. Later, he confesses to setting out to kill both the boy and girl, but not having finally killed them. This contradicts the boy’s version of events, where he says the fixer killed the girl. Even when someone is claiming to tell the truth — are they trying to tell the most nuanced version of the truth, or arriving at the most palatable version of it so they can protect their image in society?

Mahabal and Thakkar’s show reminded me of The Jinx: The Life & Deaths of Robert Durst (2015) – a bizarre case around American millionaire Robert Durst and the disappearance of his first wife. It’s a stinging critique of the American justice system, where the rich can get away with murder. On the flip side, Black White & Gray tells the story of a society where lies or near-truths have become so normalised, the actual truth remains shrouded in a cluster of unknowables.

Probably inspired by the last-scene cliffhangers in Psycho (1960) and The Usual Suspects (1995), Black White & Gray does it without looking gimmicky. It knows only too well, where a society is so invested in playing the protagonist of their own stories, the antagonist will always be the big picture that paints them as cogs in a dishonest, manipulative machine.

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