A brilliantly designed terror plot

Film: Kurbaan

Cast:

“When a bomb explodes, mainly the innocent die,” says Vivek Oberoi towards the finale when, to put it at the most basic level, all hell breaks loose

In Rang De Basanti, Rensil d’Silva had taken screenwriting in Hindi cinema to a new level of expressionism. With his directorial debut Kurbaan, Rensil carries the spoken, unspoken, visual and metaphorical language of mainstream cinema to an unvisited shore.

Blending the thorny theme of the politicalcultural identity of the Muslim community post 26/11 with the commercial identity of contemporary Hindi cinema is not an easy task. The film manages to be superior to other films on global terrorism, a theme that now threatens to turn into a full-blown commercial formula.

In Kurbaan, the characters are not representational of Islamic ideology. They function in the brilliantly-designed plot as people who subscribe to the view that the Muslim community across the world is the victim of American oil-politics that threatens to annihilate the Islamic world.

This is very thin ice for a debutant director to walk on. Rensil’s film says that a sense of aggressive isolation grips the Muslim community. There are either those (like the characters played by Saif, Om Puri and Kirron Kher) who think a direct action plan of retaliation is required to save Muslims from mass destruction. Or, more alarmingly, there are those like the characters of Vivek Oberoi and his father (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) who are tacitly in favour of violence against their community’s collective persecution.

Either way, Rensil’s film looks at the theme of Islamic terrorism with fearless and brutal honestly.

After a rather pale courtship in Delhi, Hindu lecturer Avantika (Kareena) flies into New York with her ever-so-suave suitor Ehsaan (Saif).

The narrative immediately plunges Avantika into the vortex of a 26/11-styled conspiracy being hatched in her backyard on a deceptively quiet suburban street filled with Asian homes.

If the closet terrorists in the narrative are master plotters, director Rensil is no less. While the master-plotters in Kurbaan finally fail, Rensil walks past the finishing line with victorious strides. With cinematographer Hemant Chaturvedi, Rensil moves stealthily in and out of politically-challenged lives with the least amount of drama and ostentation.

The background score is kept at a bare minimum. Kurbaan creates its drama from the characters’ misbegotten sense of identity. From that vantage point of disorientation, the film dexterously moves into the mode of actiondriven conflicts.

Kurbaan turns out to be one relentlessly