Language: Hindi
Independent accounts of the events that inspired Bhuj: The Pride of India are hard to find on news websites. Strangely, the available reports all seem related to the film. That said, the facts that emerge from them are actually mind-boggling.
Here’s what I could find. In the 1971 India-Pakistan war, Pakistani bombs reportedly destroyed an Indian Air Force (IAF) base in Bhuj.SquadronLeader Vijay Karnikof the IAF, who was stationed in Bhuj, was asked to rebuild the airstrip so that Indian military planes could ferry soldiers to the base to defend it against further attack. The hitch was that there was no labour available from within the defence forces for the job. Karnik approached villagers nearby for help. According to the media, about 300 civilians, mostly women, volunteered and reconstructed the runway within 72 hours.
Writer-director Abhishek Dudhaiya and his co-writers apparently did not find this extraordinary real-life feat impressive enough for a Bollywood venture. So, they have reduced 72 hours to one night for effect, given Ajay Devgn (playing Karnik) repeated slow-motion shots in which he strides purposefully towards something, and indulged in all sorts of embellishments to dress up a story that should not have needed any window dressing if scripted by a skilled team.
The combined effect of these gimmicks is the opposite of what I assume they were trying to achieve: Bhuj: The Pride of India is godawfully dull.
In the first hour, the film looks all set to be yet another stereotypical Bollywood deshbhakti drama with dialoguebaazi and drum rolls. It opens with a voiceover – laid on sketches and photographs – summarising the history of India and Pakistan from 1947 up to Bangladesh’s War of Liberation and the events in the film. Cut to President Yahya Khan of Pakistan chiding his military commander, Tikka Khan, for killing “only 30 lakh people” in what was then East Pakistan.
The genocide in East Pakistan is a matter of historical record and a blot on humanity, but the writing of the lines in that scene are so bombastic that they reduce a tragedy to cartoon material.
Yahya: “In 1947 I realised that the only way our flag would touch the sky is if it was hoisted over piles of dead bodies instead of the plain ground. Less bodies would mean our downfall. And you could only muster up 30lakh bodies?!”
Tikka: “We’ve resorted to public massacre, janaab. But Hindustan has taken over a vast area. Our forces cannot even set foot there.”
Yahya: “Isn’t this the same Hindustan that we ruled for 400 years with an iron fist?”
“We”?The use of that pronoun here is insidious, but the conversation is too laughably melodramatised, and Bhuj in its entirety too boring to be considered dangerous and effective propaganda.
Bad bad Pakistani Yahya, very bad Tikka – that’s really all that the scene tries to establish.
How can one possibly take a war flick seriously when, sandwiched between episodes involving extreme violence, we get Karnik awkwardly serenading his wife on their wedding anniversary, surrounded by other IAF personnel and their wives dancing stiffly with ribbons and red balloon hearts in hand?
Before 35 minutes are up, Karnik also hears a top-ranking Pakistani official utter this code, “Taj Mahal is a symbol of love” and responds with an impromptu rhyme: “Agar Taj Mahal pyaar ki nishani hai, toh Hindustan tumhare baap ki kahaani hai (If Taj Mahal is a symbol of love, then India is your big Daddy.)” Waah, waah! And next, grandly: “What do you know of our aukaat? We are the descendants of the great Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj who brought the Mughals to their knees and wrote India’s history with his blood.”
So far, so formulaic.
As the minutes tick along though, even the bombast is cut down, and what we get is extensive, monotonous action.
Terrible writing, sleep-inducing direction and some pretty bad acting – there’s so much that’s wrong with Bhuj: The Pride of India, that an in-depth analysis of its politics (including the BigBrother-style condescension towards Bangladesh in the closing VO) makes no sense.
Devgn’s swag as Karnik does little for Bhuj. Sanjay Dutt as Pagi Ranchhod Bhai Savabhai Rabari, an Indian agent on the border, is too heavy on his feet to be convincing as a warrior. Sharad Kelkar as Lt Colonel R.K. Nair – a brave Malayali soldier who married a Muslim woman with a physical disability, as we are pointedly told by the VO – tries to make something of this nothingness.
Ammy Virk as a fighter pilot who speaks at the speed of lightning when he delivers a speech to his men, Ihana Dhillon as a dead wife in moony flashbacks who mucks up the only line assigned to her and Pranitha Subhash as Karnik’s wife are so bad that they are worth watching. For me, the unwittingly comical high point of the film is a glamorous Mrs K in a sexily draped sari cosying up to her Mister – with whom she has zero chemistry – on the damaged runway while he is all set to restore it.
Meanwhile, Sonakshi Sinha, whose character Sunderben – leader of the villagers– should have been the star of this enterprise, is reduced to a dreary, albeit impeccably dressed, interlude. Seriously, the rebuilding of the airstrip is handled in an even less interesting fashion than everything else in Bhuj. Those of us who are waiting for Ms Sinha to get another Lootera must wait further, it seems.
Some of the war strategies when discussed between Indian officers in Bhuj sound exciting, but the execution is tedious as heck.
The only break from the boredom comes in the first half when Nora Fatehi turns up playing an Indian spy called Heena Rehman. Fatehi, it turns out, is good at action. And the scene in which she fights off a Pakistani top honcho is better shot, better edited and more suspenseful than anything in the rest of the film.
With Sharan Sharma’s lovely Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl last year, we saw that even in an India where war cries reverberate across social media and vast sections of the mainstream news media, Bollywood is capable of creating a relatable film on India-Pakistan conflict with exciting stunts yet without glorifying bloodshed itself. With Shershaah, released just this week, director Vishnu Varadhan and writer Sandeep Shrivastava showed that it is possible to realistically recreate a bloody war on screen, complete with soldiers hurling abuses at each other and officers delivering inspiring speeches, without reducing anyone on either side to a caricature or reducing any line spoken to ridiculous bluster.
Bhuj: The Pride of India clearly does not want to be like either of these two films, but it fails miserably even in its attempt to be hormonally-charged, flag-waving, chest-thumping, clichéd nationalist entertainment. Yawn.
Rating:1 (out of 5 stars)
Bhuj: The Pride of India is now streaming on Disney+Hotstar
source https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bhuj-movie-review-ajay-devgn-in-slow-motion-does-little-for-what-is-anyway-a-godawfully-dull-war-saga-9885901.html
