Last month, I had the opportunity to watch a film at Cinepolis in Westend Mall, Pune. Happily, it was my first time watching a movie at an Indian theatre and I was joined by two of my good friends, Rajlaxmi Ror Urbi from Bangladesh and Santasa Sansu from India.
For this reviewer , seeing the film "Faraaz," was a stirring reminder of what had happened in my country a few years back and one of the many souls who had been lost all too soon. When you're done seeing, there is actually so much to unpack, that I decided to write a brief review of my thoughts on the film.
Without a doubt, Hansal Mehta is responsible for so many confidence-inspiring biopics like Shahid, Aligarh, Omert�, and the web series Scam 1992, and for many Faraaz will loudly and proudly sit among them. But at its root, you experience this perspective-changing, soul-rattling, death-dealing dilemma in Hansal Mehta's Faraaz (2023), based on the cold-blooded terror attack on Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka on the fateful day of July 1, 2016, in which 22 souls lost their lives, most being foreign nationals.
The film is a gripping you-are-there account of Faraaz Ayaaz Hossain, who had the second option of fleeing to safety after hostage-takers spared him to go but Faraaz chose to stand by his two female friends. A descriptive term for him that recurs again and again in my mind is 'beyond brave'-a reference to the death defying, danger denying, larger-than-life quality of Faraaz's character.
Imagine if the stakes are life and death realities and you are stuck in a hostage situation with no exit plan and the terrorists demand you to reveal your religious identity at gunpoint, what will you do? Will you conceal it to save your life, or will you reveal it to sign in your death warrant?
The film kick starts with how the terrorists are getting ready on the day of the attack without any preplanning. In fact, just hours before the covert operation, like many youngsters, they go about their daily business and crack jokes, fight over food and ask their leader what to wear. Cut to the chase - they slice open a guard's throat and indiscriminately shoot people, mostly foreigners, in the neck. Terror aside, they are polite, handsome, and modern.
As you'll see, the film is a slow burn, but every 24 frame per second makes you feel the plight of the hostages and relatives. Back inside the café, the terrorists target foreigners - based on religion and region - but at the same time, they also showcase empathy and fear. Knowing this, the chef of the café hides his religious identity by saying that the name tag on his uniform is a typo. Soon thereafter, when he attends to his cooking duties at the bakery for the terrorists and hostages, one of the terrorists sees Goddess Laxmi's wallpaper on his phone. You can easily feel the chef finding himself at death's door.
On top of that, you can also taste the tension of the other story running right outside the café where the film shows how security personnel botched up the counterattack and the desperation of victims' panicky relatives. Best of all, director Hansal Mehta, however, with his sheer brilliance, finds ample humour even in such edgy situations. Moreover, the film's simplicity is what seems to bind the audience with mighty cables, with no big need for a plot twist or dramatic climax.
The director not only steers clear of clichés, he even pokes fun at them. In a tragicomic scene after the cops have besieged the café, the police commissioner announces via a megaphone, "Police has surrounded you from all sides; there is no way of escaping." A rusted line from retro 80s film! The police chief then looks back irritably at his subordinate and quips a punch line, "Who writes all this?"
For more diversity, most of the characters in the film are depicted as real and relatable, with people from all walks of life. Faraaz and Nibras played a vital role in the film.
The fact, however, Faraaz and Nibras know each other since early childhood and have played football together. Their argument on religion and reclaiming Islam has the urgency and the brevity of penalty shootouts. Even when given a pass, Faraaz refuses to abandon ship and helps protect his friends, one of them, a Hindu.
By almost any definition, the terrorists did it to be remembered, Faraaz did it for the whole of humanity, and he stood tall, in those darkest, deathly hours. On the down side, some characters appeared in the movie seemed amateurish and unprofessional. But imposing in its superb grasp of the forces of terror, gripping in its moment-by-moment account of the rising tension, and revelatory in disclosing the bare bone realities when death is a very real possibility, this absorbing, accessible and authoritative account of Faaraz's life and death is destined to become the definitive retelling of the bloodshed event. The movie strips the real life story down to its visual and narrative essentials and at the same time offers a thought-provoking look at the importance of standing up and riding to the rescue for what is right, even in the darkest of hours.
