Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tears and smiles all mixed in one fate, 16 Oct 2006
A beautiful film about a very serious problem, the political strife in divided Kashmir in India, I mean in the Indian half of Kashmir. Beautiful because of the dancing, the music, the constant celebration of something or other since one of the main characters is a TV actress. The main hero is himself able to sing, to dance, to play some music, to draw and to paint, and do so many other things. This gives a great atmosphere and a marvellous picture of what Indo-Aryan people are. It also gives an extremely open vision of the Moslems there who are not at all submitted in any way to any orthodox fundamentalism. Yet behind this brilliant picture, there is a situation that hurts in the deepest cells of our brain. The fundamentalists are trying to take over this half of Kashmir and reunify Kashmir under a basic moslem rule. The fundamentalists are shown as terrorists who cast a curse, a death sentence - it has another name but this name does not tell us what it really is - against anyone who will cooperate with Indian soldiers or police. The first victim of this sentence is a doctor who dared take care of a wounded soldier, and the second victim will be a child who will not find the treatment he needs because of the fear of doctors who refuse to treat him. The film also shows how the police can kill a whole innocent family just to kill one terrorist, making us wonder who the terrorists are then. Then we sink lower and lower into the terrorist dilemma with the main hero who is divided between avenging his family killed by the police and recognizing that it was an accident and yielding to the love of the beautiful girl who is a TV actress and forgiving the police. We are thus taken down into the minutest details of a terrorist attack against the Indian Prime Minister and our hero will make it fail at the very last second due to his epiphanic conversion. This is Indian cinema that associates drama and even tragedy to romance and musical pageant. That's a way of looking at life as being always the association of totally antagonistic elements and considering the truth can only be found in such a cocktail of black, white and grey elements into an optimistic finishing colourful touch. It is a way to see the light of hope even in the darkest moments of history and demonstrating to us that a fair dose of meditation will always alleviate unhappy events and prospects.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"His heart is broken... ...I'm the one who broke it", 4 Jun 2009
From the outset it's clear that this isn't a jaunty action film like Dhoom 2. When a doctor and his family are killed because he breaks a militant's fatwa by treating a policeman we are introduced to the ugly politics surrounding Kashmir. There follows a heartbreaking scene when the same police officer begs the doctors at a hospital to look at his fatally injured son.
The film enters a spiral of tragedy when the police's revenge attack inadvertently kills the family of a young boy caught in the crossfire. Out of sympathy and a deep sense of their own grief, they take him in.
Three traumatised souls find solace in a new family life. But this paradise is blown apart when young Altaaf realises that his new father is the man responsible for the death of his family.
This is a solid start to a Bollywood film. We have complex relationships where love, loss, and hate all combine to create a sorry state of affairs which gives birth to an angry young man who grows up to join the terrorist movement. Father figure and son become nemeses and we can understand both sides. It isn't often that we sympathise with a terrorist and it's a brave move to make, especially when tensions over Kashmir are still strong today.
The film never recaptures the spark of the opening half an hour however, though the romantic involvement with Sufiya (Preity) along with a tense finale manage to salvage it from falling into confusion.
In a nutshell: The song and dance routines won't have you humming along the next day, in fact you probably won't remember any of them as they are pretty poor for such a large film, but perhaps this is quite fitting for a film with an often sombre tone. After a while the film becomes less compelling than it should be, but you appreciate what it has to say. This film doesn't take the easy option and polarise Kashmire into 'goodies' and 'baddies' - it shows us the people in the middle, those who are recruited as tools of idealism/terrorism. You get to see how the emotions of the young and desperate are exploited by terrorist leaders to channel that angst into a passionate and fanatical hatred, and how it all effects the real people who are left to pick up the pieces. 4 stars, but only just.
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