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Line of Control (J. P. Dutta, India, 2003)
Review by Grady Hendrix
a Film Comment online exclusive
Last year, Washington had a secret cinematic Santa in Bollywood's anti-Muslim, Paki-bashing output. First, actor Sunny Deol took on a moustache-twirling Osama bin Laden look-alike in his two-fisted spy story The Hero, and now comes the big Christmas spectacular Line of Control. Featuring an all-star cast re-enacting the infamous 1999 Kargil Incident, the film has been billed as the meticulously researched mother of all war movies, featuring nine Bollywood stars as the steely-eyed action studs and the weeping women they leave behind.
Kargil, a mountain region in Kashmir, is patrolled during the spring and summer by Indian forces but left unguarded during the savage winters. In May 1999, the Indian army returned to find their bunkers in the hands of the Pakistani army and mujahadeen. They spent two weeks trying to kick them out before alerting their government superiors to what was happening. The conflict dragged on for two months until the U.S. intervened, and trilateral talks forced a Pakistani withdrawal, resulting in one thousand Indian casualties. Pakistan still denies any official involvement. These facts are presented here because, despite director J. P. Dutta's much-hyped "two hundred notebooks of research," you won't learn any of it from his film.
With the production values of a high school play, Dutta's four hour and 20 minute epic stretches its budget beyond the breaking point - revealing every crack, split, and overstressed seam. Scenes switch from day to night and back again with no rhyme or reason, and the cast often appear to be under attack by stock footage. The prints are so poorly processed that the film looks like it has been pieced together from dozens of older movies, and although much effort is made to outfit the Indian action figures in authentic uniforms, the Pakistani army apparently spends its time lounging around in cable-knit sweaters and ill-fitting helmets. The dime-store budget induces cinematic fever chills, tweaking the action into the surreal. The Pakistanis are unseen for the first half of the movie, coming across as an invisible, all-enveloping force of darkness that chews up brave Indian soldiers. In the second half, there are never more than five Pakistani soldiers onscreen at any one time, lending the events a late-night-TV funk as the same extras are killed again and again.
The narrative is rigidly formulaic: each soldier receives a backstory about his life back home, demonstrates bravery in battle, then dies heroically as they take down dozens of Pakistanis (who seem to be both blind, deaf, and physically incapable of hitting their targets). A propaganda flick that has no room for friendly fire, collateral damage, or any of the language of modern warfare, it's a throwback to John Wayne's WWII rabble-rousers, but distanced by being displaced onto a culture with which most Westerners are completely unfamiliar. Having no vested national security interest in the outcome, Americans may find the jingoistic rhetoric consciousness-raising, like going through the looking glass to see how our foreign policy looks to most of Asia.
The cast is led by Sanjay Dutt, an appealing actor who's spent a lot of time in court in recent years denying his involvement with right-wing Hindu nationalist groups. The rest of the actors are interchangeable, killing Muslims and uttering patriotic platitudes that verge on Monty Python in their po-faced absurdity. The women spend their time slathered in makeup and pining photogenically for their brave heroes. Iconic Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan doesn't appear here, but his presence is felt. His son, Abishek Bachchan, is one of the leads, playing a jackass with a heart of gold; and there's a musical interlude in middle of the movie that sings the praises of the Bofors gun. An automatic artillery piece ultimately responsible for India's strategic advantage in the Kargil Incident, it was also the cannon whose purchase exposed a kickback scandal that nipped Amitabh Bachchan's political career in the bud back in the late Eighties, tarnishing his otherwise spotless reputation.
As the rise of violent Hindu nationalism threatens to turn one of the world's great sectarian democracies into a fundamentalist Hindu state, disingenuous movies like this seem even more nauseating. Bearing the tag line "Let us never forget·" (as if there was ever any danger of that) and opening with a solemn procession of title cards featuring the names of Indian soldiers who died in Kargil, the movie presents a version of history that bears no resemblance to reality. Amateurish, repetitive, and gruelingly boring, Line of Control serves no one and memorializes nothing except bad moviemaking. It's a fitting capper on one of Bollywood's worst years yet.
Grady Hendrix is one of the founders and co-programmers of Subway Cinema,
www.subwaycinema.com.
© 2004 by Grady Hendrix
