Gutsy Girl:
It took two Bollywood superstars considerable muscle and firepower to extract Indian citizens trapped in conflict zones — Akshay Kumar in Airlift and Salman Khan in Tiger Zinda Hai; in Pranay Meshram’s Akelli, a petite Nushrratt Bharuccha takes on fearsome Daesh militants all on her own. Implausibility is obviously the film’s biggest problem– not because a woman cannot be brave, but because the hurdles in her path are so easily vaulted over.
Sole support of her mother (Piloo Vidyarthi) and orphaned niece (Mannat Duggal), Jyoti (Bharuccha), is forced to take up a job in a garment factory in Mosul, Iraq. She is told by the agent (Rajesh Jais) that it is safe, but the first scene she sees there is the blowing up of a little girl strapped with a bomb. Going back is not an option, she will forfeit the deposit.
At the factory, things go smoothly at first, there is a romance budding with charming Pakistani manager, Rafiq (Nishant Dahiya), when the barbaric IS terrorists arrive, shoot a bunch of men and abduct the women
Their leader is a lollipop-sucking monster (Amir Boutrous), who is quickly despatched with one push. Next, she finds herself trapped in the harem of the dreaded Assad (Tsahi Halevi), this one fond of handcuffs and underage girls. But Jyoti’s beauty supposedly inure her to the violence inflicted on other young women.
Her presence of mind and strong desire to escape are admirable, but it is script contrivances (Meshram, Gunjan Saxena, Ayush TiwarI) that get her to the right place at the right time, the right people to guide her (a male saviour cannot be avoided). She suddenly acquires the miraculous ability to handle a gun and drive a car that never runs out of fuel and can race vehicles with superior engines. Like the recent Gadar 2, armed men with automatic weapons cannot hit a target in front of them, simply because she is the protagonist and nobody makes films about people shot dead in the desert (the film was shot in Uzbekistan, which has the required arid expanses beige buildings).
In Delhi, families of nurses trapped in Syria are camping outside the offices of the Ministry of External Affairs and getting no response, but the entire office practically turns cartwheels to help Jyoti. The film gets so enamoured if its heroine’s resourcefulness and pluck, that when the story looks like it is ending, a long episode in at an airport is tacked on, by which time her adventure has curdled to get-it-over-with tedium.
Casting Nushrratt Bharuccha instead of an A-List actress, gives the film that slight advantage of unpredictability– now how will she get past this mob of black-clad killers? She throws herself into the part, but not to the extent of mussing up her make-up and hair. However, she can be lauded by her confidence in attempting to shoulder a film without another known actor (except maybe Fauda’s Tsahi Halevi in a thankless part) to help prop it up.
(This piece first appeared in scroll.in)
