The unnatural beauty of Dhurandhar: Why Aditya Dhar's polarising film works as pure cinema

I like things lukewarm. My coffee, my food, other people's opinions. Which, I must admit, does make me a suspect newspaper columnist, since the 'hotter' the take on a news development, the more liable it is to be lapped up by punters in a hurry to circulate views in their opinion dens.

But my policy of letting the dust settle after a contentious subject comes flying into the dog park like a frisbee makes me refrain from airing any view with a rush of blood in my head. So, I gave myself a healthy fortnight before sharing my views on the latest deeply polarising issue wracking our usually tropical nation: Dhurandhar.

One could not but be aware of the deepest schism this film seems to have created since the Great Schism of 1054 that divided the Western Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. To put it in binary form: patriots loved the Aditya Dhar movie for its literal Pakistan-bashing, while liberals hated it for being 'government propaganda'. But here's the thing--you sometimes love something for reasons very different from what most people love it for.


The moment I sat in the theatre to watch Dhurundhar, I was taken in hook, line and cine-sinker for its sheer visual force. Whether it be the opening scene of IC-814 sitting in the winter plains of the Hindu Kush in Kandahar, or the raw and scabby rage on display in the lanes of Karachi's Lyari area, I entered a heightened zone of engagement, deception, subterfuge, and grungy interlocutions that left me leaning back in my plush seat as by G-force for the next 3 hr 45 min of the movie.

Ranveer Singh, playing an Indian undercover agent behind enemy lines, the Baloch Hamza Ali Mazari, is as feral as he is ironically naive of the ways of calculating, vicious men. His very presence strangely reminded me of Ariosto's 16th c. maniacal antihero in Orlando Furioso - perhaps another 'propaganda' creation by the Italian Renaissance poet who set his epic poem in the backdrop of Charlemagne's Christian forces and invading Saracens, drawing parallels between this historical conflict and the contemporary threat posed by Ottoman Turks in the 15th-16th c?

Akshaye Khanna, slight, short, thin, whiff of the millennial man we met in, say, Dil Chahta Hai quarter-of-a-century ago, is paradoxically towering as mob lord Rehman Dakait, hankering to move up Pakistan's politico-economic value chain. Dakait is riveting in his brutality - and vulnerability. As my friend sitting next to me through the film noted, director Dhar superbly uses Khanna's mono-emotive face with that quivering lip and squinting eyes - 'as fixed as Arsenal's Gabriel Jesus' perennially arched brow-sulk face' - for all emotions.

Dhar peels away a spectacular narrative onion with deft choreography. The fight scenes are violently subcontinental, where a head being smashed to smithereens by a stone, or a man being pushed into a vat of boiling gravy, are near-palpable. Dhar could answer his more censorious critics, upset with his Grand Guignol of ultraviolence, by saying what Jean-Luc Godard famously said about his 1965 film, Pierrot le Fou: 'It's not blood, it's red.'

In our age of meme-a-minute, some of Dhurandhar's dialogues have already taken on an epical sheen. Lines like 'Ghayal hoon is liye ghatak hoon,' (It's because I'm wounded that I'm lethal), and 'Kismat ki sabse khoobsurat aadat pata hai kya hai? Woh waqt aane pe badalti hai' (Do you know the most beautiful habit of destiny? It changes when the time comes), would have made Salim-Javed and Kader Khan proud.

But what makes Dhurandhar stand out is the fluttering, flapping Khan suit canvas presented before us. In his 1919 essay, 'Das Unheimliche' (The Uncanny), Sigmund Freud, explored the psychologically unsettling experience of a familiar thing or event oddly feeling unfamiliar, even frightening, or taboo. Lyari's grimy lanes and buildings, Karachi's 'Burger boys,' even the simmering characters seem familiar things made distant, and yet not 'slumdog' exotic.

And that is what the grand, violent, intoxicated-intoxicating saga of Dhurandhar does. That is what a top-notch action thriller is capable of pulling off.