GOOD INTENTIONS GONE TO WASTE

PARMANU: THE STORY OF POKHRAN

STARRING John Abraham, Boman Irani, Anuja Sathe, Diana Penty DIRECTOR Abhishek Sharma

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If good intentions make good cinema then every propaganda lm would be a classic. In the absence of a hefty grip and a budget to rev up the key sequences pertaining to India’s historic nuclear explosions Parmanu: The Story Of Pokhran ends up more like a fable of one man’s heroism rather than the saga of a nation that woke up to a nuclear dawn.

The facts are twisted into commercial shapes including a ash point button- on-the- ngertip climax where the lm’s editor runs with breathless bravado from pillar to post, trying to keep the audience’s interest alive.

But all in vain. Parmanu is like a promised havoc that never goes beyond a wound-up whimper. The lm’s opening shows the bureaucrat-hero Ashwat Rana (John Abraham, starchy and un appable) grappling with a roomful of bored colleagues who are more interested in the samosas than Ashwat’s plans to nuclearize Apna Bharat Mahaan.

It’s an opening paying a direct homage to Shimit Amin’s Chak De

Throughout John Abraham remains in character, implacably committed to the mission even if it means pissing off his wife (played by Anuja Sathe who was excellent just recently in Blackmail, what happened here?) and even if America gets on the wrong side.

‘America’ is imagined with outrageous tackiness: a bunch of Caucasians (probably tourists picked from the Gateway Of India) sitting in front of obsolete computers monitoring India’s nuclear movements, that’s Uncle Sam watching.

Their computers, and one antiquated cellphone, are just about the sumtotal of period references that work in the lm. The lm gets its Mahabharat sinfully wrong too: rstly, the teleserial by B. R. Chopra is shown being aired in 1998, when it concluded on Doordarshan in 1990; the names of the