An Observation On The Basis Of Pathaan

Synopsis A RAW agent Pathaan has to race the clock to save the destruction of his country from an ex Raw Agent Jim.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Jim is shown to lose his family, both his wife and unborn child, who are killed right in front of him. We are made to understand deeply how Jim is affected by this and it is brought time and again. But when Pathaan utters the dialogue about soldiers, it brings in to question the portrayal of soldiers in the cinema. For decades the Indian soldier has been tropified, if I may be God if he exists, as a fiercely loyal soldier, one who is deeply commited to his country and despite the massive setbacks he faces in his life personally, goes on to defend the country, both literally and also by sacrificing his desires as a human.

But it is this very representation which is problematic in the sense that they are not shown by what they want to do but rather what they are expected to do. A soldier is expected to protect his country, in life and death, but often this death is something that I feel he doesn’t choose but is chosen for him. This is why I feel that stories that present the play for morality, in terms of good and bad and right and wrong should only be exemplified by the presentation and filming of stories that have taken place in reality. Fiction, as much as the freedom it gives, is ultimately the choices that the writer or ,auteur, so as to respect the 1st generation of the French New Wave, decides to make the characters in his story perform.

Of course there is no doubt that ultimately the film is a director’s medium to express his opinion, but to present those through a fictional story is to state an idea By taking a fictional character in a story and by making them act out, we weave a decision on the characters based on our own view. That’s needed. But the problem is, why not represent people like Jim in the lead role? If you are saying that people are ready to die for their own country or people betray their own country if humiliated, why not show people like Jim work against their own country but through other means, which I believe Force 2, another John Abraham lead film, did with its antagonist played by Tahir Raj Bhasin, as a son seeking vengeance for the humiliated death of his spy father, whom the nation had disowned.

What Pathaan does is, represent Jim in the complex way that he deserves but also ultimately shows him as a bad person because he is a person who went against his country. Why is that wrong? Isnt the anger of a beloved one something that hits us deeply so as to change our whole viewpoint as in Hey Ram, where Saket Ram went on a blind hate campaign against Gandhi due to the riots which killed his wife which he thought was instigated by Gandhi? Why is Jim even during his death humiliated as a bad soldier because he went against the country which disowned his wife? It is this reason that this so spectacularly made film, aesthetically, fails, not because Jim dies, but because Jim dies for something that the film deems as wrong and not because for something that is actually wrong which is the attempted plan of Jim to kill many of Delhi’s citizens as an act of terrorism against India.

Why not show us the stories of people who have gone against the country but still lived good lives? Sita Ramam also shows Vishnu, who gives up his country’s Army bases for his family’s safety. Maybe this film meant to have Vishnu be sad, but why not represent stories where such Vishnus live happily ever after.

Is it an attempt to stereotype people as fulfilling certain social criteria and being ultra leftist? Is capitalism ruining people’s lives bad? Absolutely. But have capitalists also been stereotyped to the point where even we are unable to believe if there is a good capitalist? This gross misrepresentation of people as being strictly good and bad through conventional society’s morality is the stifling part. Which is why stories like Kurup need to be shown.

The representation of good vs bad through fiction is not the problem, but the very use of it in an escapist way, to suggest a utopia, robs people of the reality surrounding them, creating a cloud around them that robs of them of the very truth that cinema should have been showing them. When the manipulation of everything surrounding us has begun to deceive and prevent us from reaching the truth, It should be the cinema to raise to the occasion for the very depth it is able to portray of the human life.