REVIEW: The Attacks of 26/11

THOUGHTLESS AND POINTLESS

There is a human face to every tragedy––even the most violent and horrific ones. A filmmaker has the right to choose his stories and the points-of-view from which he narrates them. For instance, Ramgopal Varma may have a greater fascination for the 10 terrorists who landed in Mumbai on 26/11 than any of their victims or those who tried to capture them. Fair enough. Then he must delineate the story from their perspective, giving us a real sense of who these people were, where they came from and their compulsions and motivations. Also how they lived through the ensuing carnage. What instructions did their handlers give them while the attacks were underway? How did they cope with the tension and the uncertainty? Was there any regret, remorse or fear? And ultimately, after nine of them died and Ajmal Kasab was captured alive, what transpired till the time he was hanged?

Much of this information should be accessible (and there’s always the option of imaginary recreations to fill the gaps). The feeling that The Attacks Of 26/11 leaves you with though is that Varma has no interest in any of his characters. Nor in expressing a general lament on human cruelty, making an ironic denouncement of violence like Michael Haneke does by shocking the viewers numb in Funny Games, or using graphic bloodshed as a set-up to accentuate the individual tragedies that follow in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.

On the contrary, it seems as if Varma likes violence for its own sake. He simply enjoys the sound of shooting automatic guns and the sight of blood gushing out of peoples’ bodies; most of all, the terror in their eyes as they succumb to a brutal death. But the filmmaker isn’t exactly a harmless kid with a plastic gun. He actually appears to have lost his ability to separate fiction from reality (even granting that facts are sometimes bloodier than fiction can ever conjure).

For him, there is no difference between the gratuitous carnage of Satya and that of 26/11. Except that the former was a script written for the screen (and now we must seriously consider how much of its success really belongs to Varma and what role writers Saurabh Shukla and Anurag Kashyap had to play), while the latter is a painful episode from recent history that most of us have witnessed at close quarters through extensive media coverage and some of us in Mumbai have experienced even more intimately because we had loved ones trapped in one or the other site. So, as a procedural, the film needed to do more than show 10 men shooting senselessly at key locations around Mumbai (shoddily recreated at that) and hundreds of people falling to the ground in pools of blood.

Who were these nameless victims? Nobody knows or cares. What were the police and government up to? Varma isn’t telling us, beyond making somnolent Nana Patekar deliver a meaningless post-facto speech to an enquiry committee. Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan should consider himself lucky he doesn’t get a mention in the film (the NSG is a mere footnote) unlike Hemant Karkare and Vijay Salaskar who are reduced to extras of the dumb filmi cop variety.

Almost the entire narrative is framed from the terrorists’ side and it starts feeling as though the camera is their voice, or more accurately, mouthpiece to their guns and grenades. The only tidbit we get by way of background is that the Jt. Commissioner (he doesn't have a name in the film) was in the shower when the first firing at Café Leopold happened and he came out baffled, not knowing which of his phones to answer first.

You could argue that every film deserves to be seen for one reason or another, and by and large it’s true. But here’s one that may only appeal to pornographers of human misery who believe nothing is off limits. I fear that Varma's next could be a mockery on the Delhi rape case, acted out in graphic detail, framed from the rapists' point-of-view and capturing the glee in their eyes as a young woman writhes helplessly, with loud Raktha Charitra-type background music amping up the atmosphere.

It’s right up his street.

Comments

[Deepa Deosthalee]

Mr Aravind Kaushik, thanks for your detailed comment. In my humble opinion, Mr. Ramgopal Varma is a lazy filmmaker and worse, an opportunist. However, you are entitled to like his work, just as I am to not. My justification for the same is in the review.

[aravind kaushik]

THE ATTACKS OF 26/11 - A FILM REVIEW

Everyone who has seen and heard of Ramgopal verma has a thing or two to say about him. Those who like him talk of his weird camera angles and those who dont talk about the same too. Those who like him like the unique unusual and' very treated ' characters that sometimes are caricatures, sometimes evil, sometimes grey and real and most times 'in the face'. The people who do not like him see the same things as the reasons to not like his films.
Those who like him like the 'class' he brought to the horror genre, his depiction of violence (be it the violence of the gunshots and chases in his earlier films or be it the graphic violence of films like rakhtcharitra and 'NOT A LOVE STORY'... and the people who do not like him say that his brand of violence is ugly and sometimes darker than physical violence in reality.

Thus, the reviews of THE ATTACKS OF 26/11 film too have so far been swinging fast and furiously between the very good to the very bad.
People who love his film no matter how bad they are will put this film on the top of the charts and people who hate him can call it RGV KI AAG -PART2.

And , I am someone who has loved and hated his films. The reasons for me loving his films being the very same reasons for hating his films too...
Now..about the film THE ATTACKS OF 26/11...
... There are a lot of filmmakers who deal with issues that need to be spoken about. Terrorism is one such issue. As filmmakers , after having done extensive research on subjects such as terrrorism, there are filmmakers who through their films put across their points of view about the subject. Film as a medium in these cases would be conveying these points of view by way of storytelling ,songs and so on...Mani ratnam's films such as BOMBAY ,ROJA and Kannathil mutthumittal come to my mind . There are also a lot of war films like BORDER and SARFAROSH which explore these points of view using 'storytelling' as a tool.

The difference between these films and RGV's attacks of 26/11 lies in the fact that for RGV, his point of view is not told through a story but through a string of incidents with powerful cinematic moments. He does not have a point of view which he is trying to shout out through his film but his point of view is the cinematic medium itself.

So, right from the film's beginning where we see the 'sea' and the terrorists ssssslllllllooooowly coming in to the city and then moment after moment..becoming larger and larger till they take over the city completely.... the rhythm is just perfect here.

The best part about RGV dealing with this subject matter is that he finds space as a filmmaker through all the incident reconstruction that he has to do . The 'exaggeration' of moments of reality is his story for this film then.. A small but beautiful sequence at the VT TERMINUS is when the police inspector played by atul kulkarni wants to shoot one terrorist and aims the pistol at him only to realise that there is another terrorist from another side all ready to shoot him down. And then there is the girl at VT station through whose eyes the first 'greande dropping' is shown.
Ultimately, the film does not just become a 'docudrama' as many are calling it but becomes the story of a filmmaker exploring his space amidst an ghastly event such as the attacks on MUMBAI.

NANA PATEKAR is just about perfect and he does not ham ...even when there were so many times where he could have. KASAB's confession isnt shown in this film as it would have probably really been but which filmmaker would want to show the 'human' side of a terrorist when he as used the character to define the 'hotheadedness' of a brainwashed 'jehadi'..

I cannot see another filmmaker even coming close to thinking cinema like RGV does and has been doing. My only suggestion to him would be 'get out of INDIA and make films elsewhere' because there arent too many people with cinema in their breath here. We watch films like we read books , we watch films like we watch t20 cricket and we watch films like we go to a 'get together' or a party.

An artiste's expression via the technique of cinema isnt really something that our audience cares about when they walk out of a mall.
I thank RGV for making this film because but for his films...i wouldnt be making them.

In his body of work, THE ATTACKS OF 26/11 runs a second close to the all time classic SATYA.

[ruchi]

bloody bastard varma...
kalank.