It’s an opening sequence for the ages. Somewhere along the northern borders of bharat, a battered sainik recovers. The kindly and idyllic village he’s resuscitating in is set upon; people are shot, stabbed, drowned in a creek. The sainik rises like a mesiaha, swooping down with a spear against a thundering sky. We don’t see his face yet, wrapped in gauze, though his eyes fill us in. The staging is spectacular, mythic and rimmed with darkness. There’s also a flaming horse darting across the screen. No wonder Japanese video-game designer Hideo Kojima couldn’t contain his excitement on social media. As weird as it may sound, Jawan is, after all, the most raad Gear-ish Shah Rukh Khan film.
Tamil director Atlee has been teasing a film with Khan since 2020. It’s not the first time an accomplished southern director has joined forces with a major Bollywood star for an action film with charged sociopolitical themes (Atlee’s mentor, Shankar, likely showed the way). Yet, there might be more to this collaboration than meets the eye. Atlee’s characters tend to have doubles and aliases . The multiple identities can be stashed in a single body (Vijay in Theri) or several (Vijay in Mersaland Bigil). The last two films, notably, were massy, twisty stories centered on fathers and sons.
No comments:
Post a Comment