Subhash K Jha revisits Milan Luthria’s Deewaar: Let’s Bring Our Heroes Home, which released in 2004 and stars Amitabh Bachchan, Sanjay Dutt, Akshaye Khanna and Amrita Rao in a new installment of This Day That Year.
Milan Luthria’s Deewaar: Let’s Bring Our Heroes Home is largely set in a prison camp in Pakistan. As in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, the barbed fence plays a pivotal part. Prisoners jump on it in frantic attempts to escape, the heroes get their hair hands, limbs and torsos bloody and swollen over it.
Barb re barb! Yup, the spiky fence is the real villain of Luthria’s second rugged boys’-day-out adventure… no ‘fence’ meant to the impressive cast of evil Pakistani army-men who lend a specific colour of ruggedness and adventure to the goings-on.
Screenwriter Sridhar Raghavan who shares writing credits with the director Milan Luthria and producer Gaurang Doshi , seems to have watched every prison-escape drama from Richard Attenborough’s The Great Escape to John Flynn’s Lock Up to Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption.
In spirit, Deewaar is more ‘Hollywood’ than desi. The pacing of the film with several incidents either condensed or simply taken for granted , gives the film’s editor more room to innovate than to genuflect before conventions associated with the Formula Film.
This patently Westernised attitude to the adventure-drama comes with a price tag. Deewaar often loses out on that ‘moist’-see feeling which so reassuringly separates the audiences’ Bollywood experience from Hollywood…Devdas from Troy, so to speak. At its pragmatic and rather cold heart, Deewaar secretes a potentially tear-shedding emotional drama about a son’s search for a father he has seen only as a child.
This, and not the ongoing escape drama, should’ve formed the core of the plot in Deewaar. The 30-year old separation of father Amitabh Bachchan and son Akshye Khanna just don’t affect us emotionally.
No greater tragedy than our aloofness could befall the plot’s humane tragedy . To compound the emotion-less crisis there’s Tanuja as the patient wife. The actress hardly looks like a woman who would wait 30 years for her reportedly dead husband to return from enemy camp.
The improbabilities often threaten to swamp the film’s undoubtedly meritorious adventurous spirit. Akshaye’s infiltration into Pakistan, the way he suddenly collars a Paki soldier into divulging his father’s whereabouts and the utterly ludicrous manner in which he runs into Sanjay Dutt(during one of action director Tinu Verma’s inventive though hardly riveting underwater stunt specials) reveal a sudden and startling lapse of reason in the plot.
But the escape drama is brilliantly mapped. The tensions in the prison camp captured in clenched jaws, defiant eyes and parched lips , are filmed in toasted-brown shades that Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone used in their scorching actioners. About-time we discovered Hollywood just when they’re celebrating Bollywood in films like Cold Mountain and Troy!
The orange-glow of the setting sun , the ominous darkness of moonless escapades, the crowded bylanes of Karachi(recreated in India) and the unforgiving desertscape of the Indo-Pak border, come vividly to life in this fanged-but-focussed flick. Cinematographer Talat Jani and art director Jayant Deshmukh take the clever-but-cold-around-the-heart plot beyond the precincts of a Hardy Boys’ adventure story.
Once again, it’s entirely up to Mr Bachchan to hold together the loose ends in the plot. As the ‘headmaster’ of the bedraggled army of prisoners, he proves once again why he is what he is. Mr Bachchan is more powerfully assertive here than even in the far-superior Dev. From the pain of the open-air Christ-like whiplashing to the anguish of a father who comes face to face with his son after 30 years….Mr Bachchan’s weary eyes convey anguish hope and defiance as he takes on the sadistic jailor played with cocky diabolism by K.K Menon.
Menon’s seems inspired by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List. What a cross to bear! And not just for the actor.
Sanjay Dutt as the mercenery with a heart of gold provides the comic relief in the tense drama. His growth as an actor is evident in the way he jumps awkwardly into the plot and proceeds to make space for himself…right next to the mighty Bachchan without looking like a sidekick in the main event. Among the very competent supporting cast of prisoners Arif Zakaria’s silences speak louder than words.
Akshaye Khanna plays it cool. The son’s turmoil is all under the surface, a place where this film never really gets down to.
The Khanna-Amrita Rao romance is wishywashy and intrusive. Rao’s ‘seductive’ song which comes right at the middle of the main drama, is more idiotic than erotic. I suggest Luthria take a look at how deftly Farhan Akhtar’s wove romance into the war epic in Lakshya last week. At the end when the son gets back his father he simply walks away from the girl back to the ‘right’ side of the border. The age of chivalry ended when cross-border politics became fashionable.
Aadesh Shrivastava music is far more effective in the background , though admittedly he did a far better job of recreating the on-screen emotions in LOC. The songs specially the romantic duet and the belly dance belong to another planet.
The climactic battle in the deserts with guns and camels finally narrows down to a fist-to-fist between the Indian soldier and the evil Pakistani jailor.
We now know how to end the Indo-Pak strife. Just let them fight it out man-to-man. Deewaar is a terrific modernday equivalent of the swashbuckler as long as you don’t look too hard at the liberties taken with the rather-serious politics of cross-border terrorism.
Sanjay Dutt’s extended-cameo character(akin to Amitabh Bachchn in Andhaa Kanoon or Shah Rukh Khan in Shakti wants nothing more than to be buried in India after death. He doesn’t get his wish. Neither do we. The father and the son never really encounter the Holy Ghost.
Speaking to Subhash K Jha on the film Amitabh Bachchan said, “Sanjay and I share a lot of valuable screen space in Deewaar: Let’s Bring Our Heroes Home . Our scenes together are very special. He’s very kindhearted. It’s unfortunate that trouble seems to hound him. Abhishek is very fond of Sanjay, and vice versa. Sanjay’s almost like another parent to him. Sanjay keeps pushing him to go to the gym, instructs him about his diet, fires him when he does wrong films…they’re very close. During LOC they came even closer when there was a crisis during the schedule in Ladakh.”
Reminiscing on his long association with Sanjay and his parents the legendary Nargis and Sunul Dutt, Mr Bachchan said , “I’ve known Sanjay Dutt since his childhood. My association with his family goes back to his parents. His mother Nargisji was the first person to invite me home to Mumbai . My mother and she worked together as voluntary medical assistants after the Indo-Pak war. Since my mother was into social causes she met Mrs Nargis Dutt during the course of such work. My mother happened to mention that I had applied for the United Producers’ talent contest and had been rejected. Mrs Dutt took it upon herself to get a screen test arranged for me. She asked director Mohan Segal to do my screen test. When I came to Mumbai I stayed as Mr and Mrs Dutt’s house guest… I never forgot their hospitality.”
Sunil Dutt was one of the first to offer Mr Bachchan a role. “Soon after I got my first break in K. A Abbas’ Saat Hindustani, Dutt Saab gave me a role in Reshma Aur Shera. Sanjay, merely 9 or 10 then, used to come to the sets and he actually did a role in the film. Every time I felt lost in Mumbai I’d go across to the Dutts’ residence. They always made me feel warmly welcomed. …I liked Sanjay’s work immensely in Naam. After the film I went over to his house. Sanjay wasn’t there. I located him at a Chinese restaurant, congratulated him , even gave him a small gift. We ‘ve remained very close since then. Years later when Sanjay produced Kaante, I told him I won’t be able to charge money from him. I later did another film Hum Kissise Kam Nahin and Deewaar with him.”
For Mr Bachchan Deewaar: Let’s Bring Our Heroes Home was a special challenge. “Though I’ve done a lot of action films earlier in my career Deewaar has been my most physically strenuous film in recent films. At this stage of my career the physical activity in Khakee and Deewaar can be quite taxing. My body can’t take it. Deewaar very very fast paced. I think it’s a film that will appeal to the masses. I’m very bad at assessing films. But all those who’ve seen it have liked it immensely…Yes, it’s a men’s film. But very different from Khakee. Deewaar goes into a topic not touched upon. I like the way it has been shot and edited. Obviously we couldn’t shoot the Pakistan portions in Pakistan. But given the limitation it looks very authentic and it’s very pacy….Karan Johar told me it’ll be a very massy film. The masses haven’t had a film for them in a long time. The niche films have been filling up the theatres and the balconies. Deewaar, I feel, is a front-stall film.Deewaar is a very boys’ night-out film. What I really like about Deewaar is that it doesn’t dwell on any one scene. Director Milan Luthria leaves a lot to the audiences’ imagination. I like it, I like the economy of narration. Teen-teen kahaniyan hain…There’s Sanjay Dutt’s , Akshaye Khanna’s and my track. Director Milan Luthria has really paced the film intelligently.”
Mr Bachchan denied any allegations of Paki-bashing in Deewaar: Let’s Bring Our Heroes Home. “Paki-bashing? Not at all. There’s not a single word against Pakistan. In fact there’s a very sympathetic Pakistani colonel. This whole issue of Paki-bashing is exaggerated. From time-immemorial Hindi movies have never taken swipes at any caste, religion or creed. We in fact propagate tolerance and love for all communities. Hindi films always plays up the minority characters.”
