
4 minute read
Cine Talk
from 2010-03 Sydney (2)
by Indian Link
Taking the spirit of sportsmanship across the border
Film: Lahore
Cast: Aanaahad, Sushant Singh, Farooque Shaikh, Shraddha Das, Saurabh Shukla
Director: Sanjay Puran Singh Chauhan
Combining sports and politics is not an easy thing to do. But then it’s not that difficult either, considering the two are inextricably intertwined, specially in the Asian subcontinent. Debutant director Sanjay Puran Singh Chauhan dares to visit this forbidden territory.
Lahore is about sports and politics and characters from both the spheres getting embroiled in a terrible fight to the finish.
The script accommodates a great deal of the sporting spirit as seen in the perspective of IndoPak politics. Within that ambitious framework, Chauhan weaves in the human relationships that make a leap for warmth and then stay stuck in semi-sterility. The film has too much to say on sports, politics and human nature. It isn’t able to say all of it in a lucid language.
Chauhan has chosen a unique sport like kickboxing to spotlight the process of cultural assimilation that underscores all the perverse politicking that goes on at the surface level between the two countries.
The Indian and Pakistani coaches played by Farooque Shaikh and Sabyasachi Chakavarty are seen to be sportingly at loggerheads, but Lahore takes the spirit of sportsmanship across the border with more seriousness of purpose.

In the boxing ring, the game gets deadly when the Indian kickboxing champion Sushant Singh is delivered a deadly blow by his Pakistani opponent. A churning point in the narrative is arrived at in restrained rhythms.
This is where Chauhan’s narrative comes into
They shop until they drop
Film: Hide & Seek
Cast: Purab Kohli, Arjan Bajwa, Mrinalini Sharma, Samir Kochhar, Amruta Patki, Ayaz Khan
Director: Shawn Arranha
So whodunit? Put a bunch of assorted men and women into a shopping mall not to shop, but to get bumped off. And voila, the whodunit takes the characters to shop until they drop, one by one.
There’s a Santa Claus with a hatchet in hand running around the deathlystill, sparkling clean but eerie mall. The polished surfaces of the mall glisten with a glorious promise of gore. This, we’ve got to see.
Luckily, the unravelling of the mystery of the murderous mall is not a disappointment. Hide & Seek packs in a punch. Srikant Saroj’s camera stalks the corridors with a restless energy. The whole project seems to have been conceived and designed so that an emptied-out shopping mall could be used as a venue for some hardcore scares.
Once the six friendsturned-enemies are clamped shut in the mall, the plot thickens in rapid fire motions.
The characters, including a north Indian-hating Marathi politician, played rather loudly by Arjan Bajwa, and a nerd-turnedfilmstar played by Ayaz Khan, create a stifling circle of tension, some of it palpable, others pale. its own. The dilemma of the deceased kickboxer’s younger brother Veeru (newcomer Aanaahad) to preserve his sporting spirit in the midst of highvoltage mutually-destructive Indo-Pak politics is built into the plot with architectural astuteness. Not all of the material outside the central conflict, where Veeru forsakes cricket to pursue his slain brother’s dream in the kickboxing arena, works on the scripting level.
Does Veeru only want to use the boxing ring to avenge his brother’s death?
Though the characters falter in quantitative excess, the opposition of sports and politics and politics in sports is put into a persuasive perspective. The rest of drama tends to get tedious mainly because there are too many characters swarming the Indo-Pak map. Veeru’s romantic attachment to the Pakistani girl (newcomer Shraddha Das) is skirted across in a few scenes where they exchange veiled pleasantries. Passion is seriously forfeited in the flurry of squeezing in a large canvas of characters.
It’s in the kickboxing scenes that the film exudes blood, sweat and tears. Aanahaad and his opponent Mukesh Rishi reveal a skill in the ring that cannot leave the audience unaffected. Aanahaad does well in the sports scenes, but needs to brush up his skills in the emotional moments.
Of the rest of the cast Nafisa Ali, Ashish Vidyarthi, the late Nirmal Pandey and several other talented actors are wasted in sketchy roles. The film’s surface is over-populated.
But its inner life suggests a sincerity of purpose. Wayne Sharpe’s background score and Neelabh Kaul’s cinematography are first rate. They add to the feeling of a film that goes beyond sports, but stops short of making a statement on life lived on the border of hostility.
Lahore is not only about kick-boxing. At times you wish it was.
On the whole, the mayhem-in-the-mall holds together.
On occasions, the characters are driven into postures of terror more by exterior forces rather than by a genuine sense of plotting urgency. The most heart-inthe-mouth moments feature debutante Amruta Patki caught alone in a movie theatre and later cowering in a ladies toilet as ‘Santa with the axe’ stalks her down the washroom.
So what’s Hide & Seek really about? Is it about six high school friends who once got caught in a party plastered with jealousy, intrigue, rape and murder? Or is it just mayhem in a mall caught on a camera that knows how to zig-zag through the serpentine corridors?
Either way, the film offers interesting possibilities of high anxiety. Debutant director Shawn Arranha displays skill and control in the way the individually aggravated characters are kept in check when they come in contact with one another.
The performances are enthusiastic, Purab Kohli being particularly interesting to watch as a mentally disturbed young man who thinks love is just a wish away.
Some of the acting does get overthe-top although the director seems to avoid excess as much as he can in a film belonging to genre where gore is glory.
Grant the film a few extra points for inventiveness. Also, the ‘slash-and-maim’ quotient is minimal. And the end-game where we the audience are played with as much wicked relish as the characters, is the kind of twist amateur whodunits revel in.
For an evening of chills, this one is sufficiently equipped. But don’t look for too much more in the haunted shopping mall than meets the eye.
Subhash K Jha, IANS




