K (John Abraham) wakes up in a strange room overlooking the snowy wastes of Siberia, but all he can think of is getting his next cigarette, even when his girlfriend Anjali (Ayesha Takia) phones him on his mobile to ask where he is. He leaves the room and ends up in a corridor, but the guard he sees isn't interested in answering his questions, and actually fires a bullet through the wooden wall to dissuade K. There's only one thing for it: he must break through the window, jump out, run across the snow to the cigarette packet near the bathtub and... wake up.
No Smoking was a notorious flop in its native India, but it did become a bona fide Bollywood cult movie, not because it was popular but because so many, in the opinions of its fans, missed the point of its surreal message-making on the subject of tobacco. Although he went uncredited, this was an adaptation of Stephen King's short story Quitter's, Inc. which detailed the extreme methods a company went to in the field of persuading people to give up smoking. That story had been adapted before in the horror anthology Cat's Eye, where it was James Woods playing the nicotine addict in over his head, but more importantly for this film the source had been just twenty-two pages long.
Enough for a half hour portmanteau segment, but not really enough for the whole two hours Bollywood audiences expected at the very least, so director Anurag Kashyap opted to beef this up a bit - well, a lot - by weaving in references to Franz Kafka, implementing that celebrated author's devices of elliptical storytelling and baffling situations the protagonist is inescapably trapped within. When the popular audience gave this a go, or what little of them brave enough to try it anyway, they walked away confounded, yet no matter what the film's champions thought, Kashyap's themes were hopelessly muddled in his attempts to be provocative, which included one major allusion which was, to be generous, a misstep his work was not able to carry.
K lives with Anjali but she is thinking of dumping him thanks to his cigarette habit getting out of control, here depicted as something as life-destroying as heroin or crack cocaine. It's true that in the long run that's likely to be the case, and the millions of cancer deaths because of tobacco were obviously playing on the filmmakers' minds, but the way this went about telling the story on the surface couldn't decide on whether this was a matter of free will or whether the smokers were victims of either the tobacco companies or social pressure. Whichever, once you were hooked the analogy Kashyap made was between the addicts and - get this - the millions of Jews murdered in the Holocaust; making that more overt started with a scene featuring Anjali crying at Schindler's List, then went over the top.
Or as over the top as something with this leaden, doomladen atmosphere could achieve, which given the heavy trudge to its even heavier conclusion was none too rewarding. Not helping in dispelling the stereotype that South Asians had no concept of the Nazis' crimes against humanity, there was nonetheless a conspiracy tenor to No Smoking which might have pulled its concerns off should it been offered more space, but as it was a claustrophobic plot with K mixed up with the weirdly religious association who force their clients, willingly or not, to give up the coffin nails provided the tension. The difference with the King story being that the corporation didn't actually murder anyone if the clients failed: they were nasty, but not killers. Here, however, guru Paresh Rawal orchestrates all sorts of havoc in the life of K, which leads up to his recurring nightmare coming true and people he holds dear suffering quite a bit, leading up to a finale which sees his soul taken to the virtual gas chamber along with a bunch of other would-be quitters. The point would be lost on most.
