|  Sheen
Movie Review
A little boy can't stand it any longer. Mute witness
to the terrorism in the Valley, the Kashmiri Pandit's
son rips off the Pakistani flag waving on Indian soil.
Unlike other recent
films on the mindless brutality of militancy, "Sheen"
isn't a pretext for Pakistan-bashing. Nor does it turn
terrorism into a formula. Ashok Pandit's "Sheen"
goes into a grim and hitherto neglected aspect of militancy
in the Kashmir Valley: the plight of the Hindu Kashmiri
Pandits who became displaced and homeless refugees in
their land.
Sad to say, the film
doesn't really go down the steps of the political well
to extract the water of wisdom. In telling the horrific
tale of Pandit Amarnath (Raj Babbar) and his family's
journey from well-settled bliss to displaced damnation,
director Ashok Pandit resorts to several stock gimmicks
of mainstream Hindi cinema, like a romance replete with
the harvest of atonal love duets that leave the narration
panting for breath.
Unlike other holocaustic
romances like Vidhu Vinod Chopra's "1942: A Love
Story", Anil Sharma's "Gadar" or Chandraprakash
Diwedi's "Pinjar", or even Suhail Tatari's
fine but neglected TV series "Kashmeer", "Sheen"
has neither the essential raw material nor the talent
and infrastructure to create a compelling portrait of
an emotionally surcharged, lush and lyrical landscape
scorched by clannish outrage and patriotic pride.
What "Sheen"
has on its side is plenty of sincerity. The director's
heart bleeds for a non-violent community rendered homeless
by its non-aggressive stand and the hope that one day
they'd one day return to the Valley of their dreams.
Raman Kumar's screenplay
infuses poignant pockets into the flawed narrative.
At the refugee camp Pandit Amarnath's wife (Kiran Joneja)
keeps washing the keys to their home every morning.
"This is my way of assuring myself that we'll be
back home some day."
When Pandit Amarnath
is about to leave his home in Kashmir with his family,
his daughter hides in the favourite corner of the house
and refuses to leave.
The sequence is directly
inspired by the finest celluloid document on the wages
of communal-political tension - M.S. Sathyu's "Garam
Hawaa" where the reluctant Indian Muslim migrant,
Balraj Sahni's old mother, hides in the kitchen when
the family is about to migrate to Pakistan.
The poignancy of the
family in "Sheen" migrating within their own
country should have been far more intense. Somehow the
impact of Ashok Pandit's hard-hitting treatise is blunted
by the sheer humbug that creeps willy-nilly into the
narrative. The central romance between the debutant
pair is decimated by the callowness and lack of screen
presence of the actors.
For a large part of
the narrative, the male debutant Tarun Arora is kidnapped
by militants and kept out of celluloid range.
We must thank the militants
for sparing us the ordeal. The absence of a charming
lead pair is one of the several impediments to the film's
overall completeness as a socio-political statement
on the expulsion of a people from their home. And yet
if "Sheen" manages to strike a chord in the
viewers' heart, it's because of the poignancy of the
true life material that forms the core of Ashok Pandit's
film.
The incidents, such
as Pandit Amarnath's young son being killed by militants,
appear to be straight out of newspaper headlines. To
that extent they provide the plot with an urgency.
However, that imminence
never acquires an intimacy. The characters don't connect
with viewers' hearts. The background music (Tauseef
Akhtar) and the cinematography (Nadeem Khan) do not
lend the much-needed sense of credulity to the progressively
melodramatic content.
Scenes of rioting and
mob violence, so essential to showing the dehumanisation
of a civilised society, make do with meagre crowds who
form a scattered emblem of dissent rather than an assimilated
fulcrum of drama and tension.
Budgetary constraints
diminish much of the director's heartfelt pain. So do
the performances. His off-and-on Kashmiri accent notwithstanding,
Raj Babbar turns in the film's only convincing performance.
The rest of the cast fails to come to grips with the
enormity of the tragedy that Ashok Pandit addresses
his cinema to.
In its fantasy conclusion,
the film shows the broken but still hopeful Kashmiri
Brahmin addressing a conference on the internally displaced
in Geneva. At this point of the neatly edited (by Kuldeep
Mehan) material we cannot but applaud the film and its
director for picking on a cause that does not get much
play in the media.
In one sequence, Pandit
Amarnath asks the CEO of a news channel why terrorists
are given so much coverage. The latter answers: "Because
they give us sensational visuals. Why don't you do the
same things - kill, loot and plunder - and we'll give
the same coverage to Kashmiri Pandits?"
movie review by glamsham.com |
