Bringing a real-life story, especially one based on a much documented rescue mission fresh in public memory, is fraught with risks. Questions over how much liberty can one take in deviating from the actual events and over how much drama can be injected into it, tend to trouble the makers. Getting this balance just right is the key.
In his debut directorial Take off , Mahesh Narayanan, aided by some strong support from the writing department, manages to strike this balance. He does not wade into the actual crisis and the consequent rescue mission, until the second half. He takes his own sweet time in building a compelling drama around a protagonist whom the audience can identify with it.
At the centre of it all is Sameera (Parvathy), a nurse who is toiling to pay off her family’s debts.
A divorcee, her eight-year-old son is living with her husband’s (Asif Ali) family abroad. Her colleague Shahid (Kunchacko Boban) is in love with her, although she takes all effort to discourage him. Struggling to make her ends meet, she decides to take up a nurse’s job in the war-torn Iraq, with Shahid too taking up the job to be with her.
The film is based on the real-life rescue of 46 Indian nurses from the clutches of the Islamic State terrorists in 2014, with some diplomatic ingenuity. It also becomes a chronicle of the actual struggles of nurses, who have been, in some celebrated films, misrepresented as leading a comfortable life. Nothing defines their plight better than the one sequence where some of them decide to stay back even when faced with death and destruction, so that they could collect their salaries.
Parvathy is required to dig out all her acting chops, to portray a woman who is caught in a whirlwind of emotional and mental distress, hemmed in by her conservative family, caught up in the fear of how her son would perceive her relationship with Shahid, and yet being the pillar of strength of the group of nurses caught in the war zone.
Fahadh Fazil makes a late appearance as a clever Indian diplomat, but manages to leave an impression.
Director Mahesh Narayanan, who has written the screenplay along with P.V. Shajikumar, never lets the script sag with its own weight.
Mahesh seems to have carried the deftness with which he has edited films such as Traffic into the direction department too. One memorable instance is how at the interval point, Sameera’s agitated son runs out into the street, marking the film’s shift from family drama to war.
But the biggest takeaway for Malayalam cinema is the high standards the film has set in production design, convincingly recreating the war-ravaged Iraq.
It also does not thankfully slip into superhero territory in the end. For a debut, this is quite a smooth take-off.
S.R. Praveen
