test article of multi page navigation next next

No One Killed Jessica straightaway takes us into the world of Jessica's sister Sabrina Lal. The phone rings in the dead of the night to announce that Sabrina's ebullient sister has hurt himself. "Go get her treated. She's always hurting himself," Sabrina mumbles in her sleep.

The hurt, this time, is far deeper than expected. Wounds too deep to be repaired open up in our socio-political and legal system as Sabrina's case becomes a cause celebre...once again! In re-creating the heinous crime from 1999 and the woeful attempts to suppress evidence to save the life of a bigda raeeszada, director Rajkumar Gupta is dead-on accurate. The mood of justice-smothered prevails from Frame 1. Cinematographer Anay Goswami swoops down on Delhi (the sutradhar of the plot, so to speak) to capture the mood of sweat grime and crime. Amit Trivedi's wry resonant rippling sinewy music casts a zingy spell over the goings-on. Trivedi in fact invests a 2011 feel to the happenings in 1999 without subverting the periodicity.

Aarti Bajaj edits the footage with an austerity that gives us barely a chance to grieve for Sabrina and her distraught parents. We don't miss the mother's glazed eyes, though. The pace is relentless, perhaps a little bit too much so. Why the paranoid persistence about creating a breathless pace? We weren't going away anywhere, Mr Gupta.