Empuraan, with its gimmicky violence and vigilante posturing, is not out to widen your perspective or open up history. All it wants to do is pick your pockets, observes Sreehari Nair.
To the makers of Empuraan, the right-wing backlash to their movie must have come as a godsend.
Thanks to that, Empuraan will not only get a new lease of life; it may even live on as a symbol of political resistance.
Intellectual cafes will compose hymns. Seedy parlours will distribute uncut versions.
Students of sociology, take note.
This is a lesson in how an eminently unwatchable, mostly laughable work acquires the glamour of being 'underground' and 'revolutionary'.
When a movie takes on a grand historical tragedy, you can tell if 'its eye' is trained on exploring the human dimensions of the tragedy or if it's trained on making a killing at the box office.
And Empuraan, with its gimmicky violence and vigilante posturing, is not out to widen your perspective or open up history. All it wants to do is pick your pockets.
Among the floating voices applauding Prithviraj's 'courage', I heard a patronising remark being passed about Kai Po Che. The gent who made the remark probably thinks Abhishek Kapoor's movie 'too detail-oriented to be political', 'too balanced to be effective muckraking', 'too character-focused to be editorial'.
But let us set aside those allegations for a moment and look back to that very well-done melodrama, which had as its spine the Gujarat riots.
As in Empuraan, Kai Po Che too had a character whose fiery speeches hinted at the complexes and fears running inside him.
Yet, Abhishek Kapoor had the good sense to not turn his right-wing goon into a stock villain, a motorised poster boy for the great tragedy.
Oh no, Kai Po Che was more interested in looking at the human truth that accompanies most communal riots: The movie showed us that in times of such riots, it's the people you once considered your closest friends, the people whose kids once played with your kids, that you first end up targeting.
The stinging fact that underlines all communal riots is the high percentage of 'intimate crimes' they record -- and it takes a visionary artist to illustrate such a fact.
On the other hand, what Prithviraj and his writer Murali Gopy have done is turn a painful chapter of our collective history into a setting for a distant, jacket-clad, globe-trotting, chopper-boarding overlord to exercise his bloodlust.
Come, come, comrades, let us not kid ourselves here!
Those who believe that Empuraan and the controversy it has generated represent some sort of triumph for a particular faction of our political spectrum are either being innocent or shortsighted.
The right-wingers who brought on the present cuts may be empty and thoughtless but do not overlook the delusions of those liberals who seem not to realise that the exploitation cinema techniques used in Empuraan could easily be used by a cunning filmmaker to make a cold, calculating, similarly exploitative recreation of Godhra, a Super-Sabarmati Express, if you will.
I know this is elementary, and reiterating it amounts to philosophical parroting, but it's a movie's aesthetic that decides its political stance.
Empuraan wants to cosy up to the liberals, but it has the soul of a right wing movie.
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