There are some very rare films that are meant to change the way we look at life’s brutal blows, or the cruel unforeseen tricks of destiny , if you want to call them that. Honey Trehan shocks stuns and rivets us in Punjab 95 with his unsparing meditation on the most vicious collateral damage in the history of mankind.
Contrary to perception, Punjab 95 is not about the separatist campaign in Punjab. There is not even a passing mention of the ‘Kh’ word in the entire length and breadth of this impressively cut edge-of-the-seater(editor Sreekar Prasad, please take a bow). This is a film that warns us,with thunderous ramifications, about what happens when excessive power is given to any governmental machinery, in this case the police force.
The merger of factual documentation with a walloping narration is rare in cinema. The last time I saw this slippery synthesis of violent history with cliffhanging cinema being achieved with so little violence (don’t miss the irony) was in Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning. Of course that was another time, another trauma. Punjab 95 is also in the past. Or is it really?
Nothing director Honey Trehan has done in the past prepares us for this blast. This is not only a harrowing depiction of an unspeakable crime against mankind, it is also a first-rate film per se , so impeccably cast , every actor seems decreed by destiny to play his part.
Of course, Diljit Dosanjh as the humanrights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra is preponderantly positioned. He conveys the slain hero’s obstinate humanism with a blend of pride and compassion.
But it is Suvinder Vicky as the rogue cop, Surjit Singh Sugga (who proudly claims to have snuffed out 2500 lives in dubious encounters) who brings that sense of terrifying dread to the theme of unmanned power.
In one of the most vile (and lengthy) sequences, Sugga and his team barge into a suspected terrorist’s home. Sugga stages an elaborate drama of kangaroo justice (spoiler: you may not want to taste sarso ka saag for a while after watching this) before gunning down the entire family.
Frankly, I was shaken by the volume of violence which unravels as we watch families being broken open, mothers wailing for their missing sons, brave wives going on with life with smothered tears. There is a stupefying anguish at the heart of Punjab 95, seldom seen in any film on militancy.
Technically on solid ground, with K U Mohnan’s camera making aesthetic sense of the chaos of terrorism, Punjab 95 is a surprisingly slick uncompromised rendition of a human tragedy that defies all laws of Nature. Midway in the narration, director Trehan swerves into a police thriller about a missing person. Until this point, Arjun Rampal is just a voice. Hereafter he becomes a presence. Hopefully , the film will release soon—it must!—and like Arjun Rampal’s voice, acquire that sense of a living presence in our history that all history’s mysteries must.
Punjab 95 makes Gulzar’s Maachis look like a teaser trailer.
