The way we war?

The second and the more disturbing reason for discussion is that the four-hour film, which has reportedly been trimmed at several centres subsequent to its release last Friday, in effect serves as a propaganda pamphlet for the necessity and the glory of war. In a triumph of the will and stamina, several of Dutta’s screen heroes lay down their lives, their supreme sacrificial acts almost always accompanied by dreamy flashbacks of the dupatta-chewing women waiting for them back home in the pastoral fields or in swanky colony houses. Dutta, not knowing perhaps how to serve the glamour quotient in a tragedy-suffused scenario, resorts to using the women as decorative props for the pastel-shaded flashbacks. Incidentally, if mention is made of a soldier’s wife who has filed for divorce and has driven him to a state of implacable angst, she is never brought before the eye of the camera. No unpleasantries please.

Similarly, the Pakistani enemy line is a near invisible force. No generals, no officers, just a ragtag posse hiding its faces, weapons and ammunition under a purdah of rocks and boulders on the craggy terrain. Inexplicably, Dutta does not dramatise the combat between the Indian and Pakistani forces, culminating in an interminable show of our soldiers firing away into abstraction, infallibly invoking religious battle cries. If soldiers from any of the minority communities fought valiantly or lost their lives, they are shockingly marginalised. As for affording a perspective on the relations between the two countries, banish the thought. The war unspools from a vacuum, the role of the governments, the pulls and the pressures, being relegated on screen to army officers receiving and executing commands over a particularly overused telephone system.

To be sure, of late Pakistan-bashing appears to be a favourite sport in several of the action-centric films of Bombay cinema. In that context, LOC is no different from Gadar, Hero and Zameen which aimed salvos at Pakistan with the kind of relentless pseudo-patriotism, exaggeration and chest-thumping that hardly makes for responsible cinema. Some sense seems to have prevailed upon Dutta who evidently bleeped out tail-ends of profane words heaped upon the enemy line. Yet the uttered words, words, as they exist, in the final print leave nothing to the imagination. Also the word “bastards” (so often deleted by the Central Board of Film Certification in less heavy-duty films) have escaped censure.

The point is: certainly don’t soft-pedal the recreation of the war as it happened. But a film by its very nature, on a true event, has to be conveyed with a modicum of balance, reflectiveness and a spirit of pacifism. The depiction also has to go beyond what every layperson knows already, it has to offer valid insights and information. Thomas A. Edison, a pioneer in the development of the motion picture, nearly 75 years ago was pessimistic about its future purpose. “I had some glowing dreams,” he said, “about what the camera can be made to do and ought to do in conveying to the world the things it needs to know. I am disappointed that it has been turned into an entertainment toy.”

Toy or no toy, what J.P.Dutta has created in the name of significant entertainment is indefensible. To be sure he did undertake a juggernaut of an epic which recalls the turbulent days and nights of the Kargil war. Lamentably, the juggernaut of a movie is full of sound, fury, gun blasts, chatty phone calls, prefabricated characters and profuse dialogue, signifying precious little. By contrast, the much smaller-scaled film, Dhoop, on the Kargil war and its aftermath, asked the key question vis-…-vis wars: “Why?” J.P. Dutta, and this is his film’s most fatal flaw, evades the question altogether. Why indeed? Perhaps because he did not focus his attention and skills on looking for an answer.

The writer is a film maker