Review: 'Lamhaa' has only few lucid moments

Lamhaa
Cast: Sanjay Dutt, Bipasha Basu, Anupam Kher, Kunal Kapoor
Director: Rahul Dholakia
Rating: **1/2

 

Lamhaa does not give you too many reasons to go and watch it. Though it is the kind of film that wants you to sympathise with its characters, the plot leaves you so utterly confused that you just want to forget this blood fest.

 

The film begins with Vikram Sabharwal/Gul Jehangir (Dutt), a military intelligence officer, harking back to the Kashmir of 1989, a beautiful valley on the boil. Intelligence officers know terrorist groups are up to no good during the election season (well, when are they?) and Jehangir is roped in to uncover their evil designs. On his pursuit, he comes across separatist leader Haji (Anupam Kher) and several other shady characters who help him for a price.

 

Aziza (Basu) is an outspoken Kashmiri girl whose character undergoes a transformation in the course of the film as she realises that many of the things she had learnt since childhood were not true.

 

All the characters in the film are fighting for their own concept of azadi. Aatif (Kapoor) is a rebel who wants to get azadi by fighting an election.

 

Everybody in the film talks about Kashmir as jannat (heaven), but the director has made little attempt to showcase the beauty of the region with only a blink-and-you-miss-it montage of the snow-clad mountains. While the film harps on the atrocities the Kashmiri Pandits have been facing, it appears to gloss over the plight of the Kashmiri Muslims.

 

The involvement of too many characters makes the plot convoluted and leaves you feeling lost midway, trying to gauge who is with the terrorist, who is with the intelligence officer, and who is neutral (except Dutt’s character, of course).

 

The plot appears loose with a lot of unwanted scenes and songs thrown in. In parts you cannot help but notice the resemblance to Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, like the scene in which two soldiers talk about leaving paagalkhana Kashmir and going home, or the one in which bombs are stitched up inside a corpse.

 

Dutt and Kher are convincing in their respective roles, but the others, particularly Basu and Kapoor, are hopelessly miscast and often overact. Basu is unnecessarily curt with all, including her family. Kapoor needs urgent lessons in dialogue delivery. Much as you want to like him, his election rally speech towards the fag end of the film makes you doubt his acting skills. Not to mention that he sounds really funny at this point.

 

The film, which aims to dissect the problems of Kashmir, fails to do so and appears to be skewed towards the problems of the pandits. But it does depict the Islamist brainwashing of children and the plight of Kashmir’s women. Kapoor’s election speech, where he says the Kashmiri Muslims have suffered the atrocities of the army while the pandits have suffered at the hands of terrorists, is perhaps the only time you feel both that communities have suffered.

 

Director Rahul Dholakia, known for taking real-life social conflicts to the big screen, has made a decent attempt to portray Kashmir’s sad story. But Lamhaa is not a patch on his critically acclaimed and National Award-winning Parzania, which was set in the backdrop of the horrendous Gujarat riots of 2002.