|
CINEMA:
MISSION KASHMIR
Seeking
Paradise
A plea
to restore peace and harmony in the Valley
By Madhu
Jain
Movie:
Mission Kashmir
Director: Vidhu Vinod Chopra
Cast: Sanjay Dutt, Hrithik Roshan, Jackie Shroff, Sonali Kulkarni, Preity
Zinta and Puru Rajkumar
There
is a symbolic moment in the film-muddy, swampy waters swallow a bright
lotus. Paradise lost? The moment is so brief that it's gone in the blink
of an eye. Vidhu Vinod Chopra's film is a plea to regain that paradise-the
pre-1989 Kashmir where he grew up and which he still considers home.
Mission
Kashmir takes you behind newspaper headlines to the individuals —
to both the perpetrators of violence and its victims. The focus of this
well-researched and tautly directed film is on the human face of tragedy
and the futility of revenge. The story-line is fairly simple. A senior
policeman, I. Khan (Sanjay Dutt), wipes out an entire family on whose
houseboat hides a militant (Puru Rajkumar in a finely etched cameo). But
his frenzied bullets spare the son, Altaf (Hrithik Roshan). There's a
Karmic twist then. Khan and his Hindu wife Neelima (Sonali Kulkarni) adopt
Altaf after their only child dies when doctors refuse to treat him following
a fatwa forbidding medical treatment for policemen or their families.
Altaf discovers that Khan killed his parents. He disappears across the
border, to return as a 21-year-old with one mission: kill Khan.
In many ways,
this is Dutt's film. You can almost read what's going on in his mind —
he speaks with his eyes. There are shades of Osama bin Laden in the Afghan
mercenary (Jackie Shroff), Altaf's mentor.
Unfortunately,
Shroff is more a comic-strip character than a dreaded militant. Like him,
Roshan teeters on the edge of being a comic-strip Hercules-the incredible
hunk with pop-up muscles, his endless neck taut, the nerves throbbing
and his eyes steely green in determination.
But only teeters. When his face and not just his muscles do the talking,
Roshan is superb as the young man torn between his love for his childhood
friend, Sufiya (a perky Preity Zinta), and his foster mother and his hatred
for Khan. The childhood and lost innocence he pines for-which elude him
even in his imagination-represent the Kashmir that once was. A Kashmir
which keeps cropping up in one of Chopra's masterful touches: the painting
that Altaf made as a child of the lake and the surrounding mountains.
Mission
Kashmir has an air of authenticity about it, unlike most other Indian
films about terrorism. The film is not simplistic with bad guys and good
guys lined up on each side. Nor are the Pakistanis the villains.
Actually,
there are no villains and heroes in this well-scripted film (novelist
Vikram Chandra is one of the writers). The fiction is built upon the bedrock
of facts.
This is no
wish-you-were-here postcard Kashmir. It's a call to peace and Kashmiriyat-religious
tolerance and harmony. And there's another message. In a poignant scene
a Sikh policeman who lost his family in the 1984 riots asks a Kashmiri
Hindu who wants to kill the captured terrorists how far back we should
go.
Let's hope
it's Mission Possible.
Top
|
INDIA TODAY Deputy Editor Swapan Dasgupta voices the despair of a community that Jyoti Basu forcibly converted into a diaspora in his 23 years of zero-contribution rule. 