Aamir

Aamir is ‘different’ in the sense that it seems that after eons one sees the streets of Bombay in a film how one might find them in real life. Aamir has its namesake protagonist land in Mumbai from the UK and get trapped in a nightmare situation. As soon as he gets out of the airport, he is put on call with a demanding and menacing gangster who wants Aamir to execute a terrorist plot if he wants to rescue his family that the gangster has taken hostage. Through the film, our man Aamir is sent from pillar to post running errands, collecting information, note slips, money and the bomb. Will he be be able to take control of the situation and prevail (the somewhat puzzling tagline goes, Kaun kehata hai aadmi apni kismet khud likhta hai, or Who says man is master of his destiny)?

Aamir is played honorably by the TV actor Rajeev Khadelwal, not an easy feat to pull off when you are held in a close-up for nearly the entire length of the film, and have to work with a small range of emotions, from being puzzled to getting mildly irritated (of ‘why are you doing this to me?” kind; character growth nahin hai, ol’ classicists may say, but that’s hardly Khandelwal’s fault). Wasiq Khan’s dressing up of locations (or sets?) keep to the gritty, realist feel (there is a loo scene – to illustrate the difficult life the Muslim qom lives in – and I’m yet to make up my find if it is done in utterly tasteless 1980s art films style or if it deserves praise for serving the above mentioned narrative point). The background score and songs deserve mention – they are done in an understated way and are often ironic.

Aamir, however, is slow and repetitive. An hour into the film, as Aamir is handed over a red carrier case, one wonders why was this not done within the first fifteen minutes itself. As noted before, the feel of the street truly adds to the film’s mise-en-scene; however, the editing is formulaic in that after an establishing long shot it cuts to several clips of close-ups of men looking into the camera (apparently wondering what our gentalman hero in woolen jacket & tie carrying a red bright case doing there?).

I have some other fundamental problems with the film – spoilers here – why does the gangster choose Aamir to be his carrier boy? When any of the available local men of the qom will carry out the fidayeen attack for a few thousand bucks, if not for free. Why does he also trust him with millions of rupees and then the bomb? What was the lecture on Qom all about? I might be nitpicking here, but the most important prop of the film, the bright red briefcase that is carrying the bomb looks close to the nuclear case the president of the US carries. All that was missing was an electronic pointer over the case saying, ‘Bomb inside!’ My biggest fight, however, is with how the film ends –– (perhaps here was an attempt to add meaning to the film’s tagline) Aamir blows himself up saving the innocent population, or, in other words, the Muslim Aamir blows himself up saving the target innocent Hindu population. To illustrate my antipathy to the concluding scenes of Aamir, let me give an example. It’s like American film producers making a “topical” and “sensitive” film in Iraq and through it sending out this message to the local population: if you are being recruited for terrorist, fidayeen attacks, please do not harm us, instead blow yourself up! These essential issues could have been redressed at the scripting stage.

The word around is also that the film is based on another film, ___ (please help me with the name here); a pity! because Bombay streets have their own ‘million stories’. As Mr Bob Dylan puts it, these tales are always right in front of you, blending together but you have to pull them apart to make any sense of them. Nonetheless, this realist, ‘heart-in-its-right-place’, low budget thriller is not a bad start for the film producers, UTV spotboy or its debutante director, Raj Kumar Gupta.