Manorama Six Feet Under

Satyaveer is a suspended engineer in an arid Rajasthan town. In his spare time he wrote a crime novel that nobody bought. A woman called Manorama contacts him: she believes her husband, the region's irrigation minister, is unfaithful, and wants him followed. Satyaveer starts eagerly playing the detective from his own book. What he then finds turns out to be far larger than an affair: water, money, and a crime nobody discusses. Navdeep Singh adapts Roman Polanski's Chinatown and does not hide it; at one point the scene where Jack Nicholson's nose is cut plays on a television. The adaptation moves the story from Californian water politics to Rajasthani irrigation bureaucracy and makes the characters local. Abhay Deol plays Satyaveer. The film opened on 21 September 2007 and was well received by critics. Who it's for: Viewers who like neo-noir, provincial crime stories, and the non-mainstream vein of Indian cinema. Who it's not for: Anyone who knows the source film will find few surprises. The pace is slow, and this was a production that did no business, with limited technical means.