Dakxin Chhara makes no attempt to hide the limited budget and resources available to him. It’s visible on screen: in the raw frames, in the drone of a background score and the rough edges in filmmaking, specially in the staging of the bomb blast scenes.
Sameer is far from sophisticated, lacking in even basic spit-n-polish. Yet it does seem to hold some promise initially, especially in its portrayal of a poor settlement in Ahmedabad that is constantly on a short fuse. Here an innocent chicken can lead to street wars and an innocent child can call a stop to it before it raises its ugly head.
Here the street theatre is run, quite aptly, by a sufi guy called Manto. And it’s here that a young engineering student Sameer (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) comes-as a mole of the ATS-looking for bomb blast mastermind Yasin. Will Yasin’s mother (Seema Biswas) help Sameer reach him?
Then there are ATS officer Vikram (Subrat Dutta) and journalist Aalia (Anjali Patil). The give and take between them also does ring a faint bell-can you summarily call terrorists butchers and be done with them? Or is there more to the cycle of violence? What helps debut director Chhara are impeccable performers like Ayyub and Biswas who make the proceedings believable and watchable.
But soon enough the film falls into the usual trappings and stereotyping of mainstream cinema-the radicalised Muslim, mother as the voice of reason and journalist as the repository of idealism. A romance too blooms on the side.
The film may have a valid point to make-that people of all religions, classes and communities (even the terrorists) are eventually pawns and victims in the larger system. That it’s the State that has been failing the people than the other way round. That certain perceptions built by the State are not just false but dangerous and diabolical.
But the twists and turns building towards a consciously explosive reveal in the climax make the film too fanciful to be taken seriously. The much desired subversion gets far-fetched and messy than pointed and plausible. That’s where the film loses a grip on itself and its larger relevance.
