Some irresponsible reviews of this important film have spoken of how the film doesn’t provide enough entertainment. It is like saying Gone With The Wind doesn’t have enough wind in its sail. Some cinematic experiences need to be judged beyond what we define as “entertainment”.
And what a heinous crime against all humane yardsticks it would be if a film on the monstrous aftermath of terror attacks would be entertaining. Yuck, yuck, yuck!
Except for a weak central performance by Emraan Hashmi and ridiculously underwritten roles for the two female leads, Ground Zero strikes all the right chords from the word go. In one of its opening sequences, an affable BSF jawaan in a busy area of Kashmir is shot point-blank in his head.
One minute, he is laughing and joking with his colleague, buying Kit Kat chocolate from a roadside shopkeeper who refuses to charge money (the jawaan puts the money into a jar for Eid donation)…, and the next moment, he is lying in a pool of blood.
The suddenness and finality of violence is doubly underlined in the opening sequence by the writers Sanchit Gupta and Priyadarshee Srivastava. And that’s the way it should be. Ground Zero never tampers with the truth, never bows down to massy gimmicks. Shot on location, the narrow gullies and open verdant spaces of Kashmir never looked more forlorn and fearsome.
The last time the Kashmir Valley looked so sinister was in Applause Entertainment’s OTT series Tanaav.
Ripping a chapter out of the bloodied history of militancy, director Tejas Prabha Vijay Deoskar re-imagines the events in the life of BSF officer Narendra Nath Dhar Dubey (Hashmi), who led the operation against terrorist Ghazi Baba in 2003.
The balance between the actual events and their cinematic interpretation is well preserved. The narration neither over-demonizes the militants nor mythologizes the BSF soldiers. There are no superfluous songs of valour and patriotism, no overt flag-waving. The narration moves in a businesslike tone, giving us no opportunity to feel we are being manipulated either way.
The core of the operations is the relationship that Dubey forms with a young, impressionable Kashmiri boy, Hussain, played with heartbreaking vulnerability by Mir Mohammed Mehroos. It is a tangled, complex, highly dangerous liaison that puts the boy in immense danger. This is where the film tells it like it is: when a cleansing process takes place, there are bound to be fallouts.
Ground Zero gets it right most of the time. The director seems uneasy doing the family bits. We shall leave that to Sooraj Barjatya.
