------------
Going in to watch Ikkis, most well-informed Sriram Raghavan fans knew they should probably not expect a typical Raghavan film – “typical” meaning twist-laden noir-suspense, with doses of dark humour and affectionate tributes to the pop culture that has influenced Raghavan the movie nerd. Ikkis, it was understood, was going to be different from Andhadhun or Ek Hasina Thi or Johnny Gaddaar, more sober and perhaps self-consciously respectful – being a dramatisation of the real-life story of Arun Khetarpal, a martyred hero of the 1971 India-Pakistan war.
And yet, as a Raghavan fan nervous about the possibility of this being an impersonal, workmanlike project that almost anyone else might have helmed, I felt on safe ground the moment I saw an Asrani tribute appear before the film started – alongside a more expected tribute to Dharmendra. “Hum aapke qaidi hain” says the text, below an image of Asrani as the jailer in Sholay – and I thought to myself, that’s Raghavan’s voice all right. The boyish cinephile.
The two veteran actors (who died just a month apart) appear briefly together onscreen when Dharmendra, as Khetarpal’s old father, visits Pakistan. With Asrani playing an Alzheimer’s patient here, this is a moment that works neatly within the diegesis of a narrative about memory and forgetting (or letting go), about conflict and shared Indo-Pak culture. But it operates at another level too, for a movie buff invested in the personalities whose work he has been stimulated by over the decades – as a sentimental tribute, a swansong to two major performers of an earlier age. 
Watching Dharam and Asrani, I thought about the first time they had shared screen space, 56 years ago – in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Satyakam – and of the moment in that heartfelt, hopelessly idealistic film where the Asrani character, clowning about, sings the words “Aadmi hai kya? Bolo, aadmi hai kya?” (What is a man?) and Dharam’s Satyapriya, all ponderous and solemn, replies that man is an elevated creature capable of love and friendship and compassion. Those higher human potentials are the warp and weft of Raghavan’s film too. I was a bit worried – based on things I had heard beforehand – that Ikkis would try so hard to be “humanist”, to set itself in opposition to more strident, bellicose, chest-thumping narratives about nation-love and evil enemies, that it might feel contrived. Well, as a war film that is also an anti-war film, encouraging introspection about the better angels of our nature – especially in moments where individuals get a chance to bond – Ikkis IS everything you’d expect. It ticks every box that would make liberals feel warm and fuzzy inside, with (probably over-simplistic) ideas about universal brotherhood, and about fair fighting on both sides in 1971. But what could have been cloying pacifism is treated here so organically, so matter-of-factly, that it works. Even for someone like me who is always a little suspicious of virtuous cinema.
Ikkis does this by focusing consistently on the small picture rather than the big one – the war scenes give us not large statements about what Pakistan and India are doing to each other, or about the deeper histories of Hindu-Muslim conflict, but instead just a ground-level view of soldiers at a specific point in time, thrust into extraordinary, surreal situations, driving giant armoured vehicles across dusty terrain in which a “dushman” wants to kill them. The taking and passing of orders, staying entrenched in the moment, the razor-sharp focus as one does one’s job as best as one can, for the motherland – all this is part of the film’s DNA, as it is in more aggressive war films; one difference being that we see the same impulses play out on the other side too, with the dushman also speaking the language of patriotism, duty, and “god on our side”. The messy randomness of what might happen on a battlefield is encapsulated in a shot where our protagonist might easily have been blown away from the side by another young man, his Pakistani equivalent, who has his tank in his sights. But the chips just happen to fall the other way – and not because of heroism alone, or because one of them has the moral upper hand.
On the whole this didn’t feel like a film that was practising sapheaded wokeness for the sake of it, without adequate reflection, without at least some hard-won cynicism about the darker sides of human nature. To me it felt honest, apart from one scene that came across as too pat: the one where Deepak Dobriyal as an embittered Pakistani soldier who loathes Indians is quickly won over by a few gentle words. This felt like idealism taken to extremes. Surely a film that is otherwise so warm and empathetic, and so mournful about war, could also allow some space to one character – who appears in a single, short scene – who isn’t willing or able to forgive?
But to return to a point made above: one big reason why I could fully open myself to Ikkis was that speaking as a Dharmendra acolyte, his screen persona was central to the film’s effect on me. This effect was strange and multi-pronged: on the one hand Raghavan is, with some verve, telling a real-life story about an actual former Brigadier who travels across the border to the place where his son died in action thirty years earlier; but at the same time, this man is played by one of our most beloved movie stars at the very end of his career; and the real-life story merges somehow with Dharmendra’s reputation as a son of the soil, a Punjabi who as a child had known undivided India, a Sikh who has written poetry himself in Urdu (with one of those poems being movingly used in the film too). It was impossible not to be sentimental about his scenes in the film – and those scenes are about a hopeful, affirmative view of the world. I couldn’t dissociate any of this from that scene in Satyakam where Dharmendra’s Satyapriya tells his friend Naren: if we don’t have idealism, what do we have left? Or words to that effect. So I’m happy to endorse Ikkis with a “Jai Sriram” – the Sriram here being Raghavan and no one else – but before that I must channel Utpal Dutt’s gleeful exclamation in Guddi: “Jai Dharmendra!”
P.S. while on Raghavan as purveyor of cultural references... Satyakam was released in 1969, which is a year that falls roughly within the “past” timeline of Ikkis – this being when the young Arun was just getting primed for his duties as a soldier. Within this narrative, the year is represented by references to the films Aradhana and The Wild Bunch (as well as Irma la Douce, made much earlier but perhaps released belatedly in India because of its risqué content). And, of course, Raghavan the Vijay Anand/Dev Anand fanboy also manages to include a talismanic image of Dev in this canvas.
No comments:
Post a Comment