Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Cast: Anil Kapoor, Anurag Sinha, Shefali Shah, Aditi Sharma
Director: Subhash Ghai
Numer Qazi Anurag Sinha is smuggled into the cloistered confines of Chandni Chowk in the first week of August. His mission is to blow himself, and scores of people, at the I Day celebrations at Lal Qila. To that end, he befriends affable professor Rajan Mathur Anil Kapoor and his activist wife Roma Shefali, a couple well-known and well-loved in the locality: he can quote ayaats from the Quran, chapter and verse, and she fights for the rights of burqa-clad women within the Walled City.
There was enough potential here for a cracker of a film, because there will always be space for movies which explore the psyche of a terrorist, given the times we live in. But the situations and dialogue creak. Ghai8217;s characters don8217;t speak, they declaim. Rajan quotes Ghalib to his students he teaches, appropriately, at Zakir Hussain College in a scene reminiscent of the movies of the 70s. And Roma is to be forever seen in Fabindia tussar saris, tussling with kohl-eyed, skull-capped youth. The talented Shefali Shah deserved better. The same problem afflicts promising first-timer Anurag Sinha as the implacable suicide bomber, who shoots co-conspirators dead for not being 8220;good Muslims8221; 8212; all frown-and-scowl, and not much else.
Only Anil Kapoor, who has worked with the director before, rises effortlessly above it all, with both heft and nuance to his performance. There8217;s a scene in which he has to sit by his dead wife8217;s body; instead of going to pieces, he launches into a long-winded explanation about Hindu-Muslim unity as his terrified little daughter looks on: only Ghai could have written it, and only Kapoor could have done it, without being laughed out of the hall.
Thumbs up for Ghai the producer, especially when he backs movies like Iqbal. But Ghai the director needs a second wind.
