This film was stuck for long in the censor board. And understandably so. What remains after the severe cuts is a one-sided inflammatory and highly provocative story of a guileless godlike tailor being brutally murdered by a couple of miscreants from another community.
The tone and pitch of the jumpy storytelling (partly attributed to censorial intervention) suggest that the entire community is responsible for the crime.
Hate crimes have no religion, and I wish over-zealous filmmakers and other aggravating forces in our society would liberate crime from religion.
At one point in the agitated narration, when an evil Mullah (with a red beard so false it looks embarrassing) tries to rape a teenage boy (with makeup so immaculate it would put Rekha to shame) the boy, a closeted spy for the Indian Intelligence , resists, and is brutally butchered by the perverse cleric.
“I wish there were more like him, then every Muslim won’t be seen suspiciously,” a law enforcer sighs.
In that moment the film exposes the hollowness of its claims to fairness, the we-are-only-showing-what-really-happened stance is unsupported by anything that we see in the length and breath of this abrasive biased and mortifying view of a crime against humanity.
Co-directors Bharat S. Shrinate and Jayant Sinha and writers Amit Jani, Bharat Singh, and Jayant Sinha have created an appalling universe of bigotry . Members of one community are shown to be kohl-eyed aggressive and violent. There is no attempt at any reasonable portrayal.
The film’s biggest flaw is not that it takes an unabashedly partisan view of the crime. Its greatest flaw is that it is a terrible product, with no cinematic value.The actors are uniformly hammy , except Vijay Raaz who tries to cut the tailor’s heavily glorified role down to size.
He is billed in the opening credits as ‘Superstar Vijay Raaz.’ I rest my case.
