"Aamir" (Language - Hindi) (2008) - Movie Review

If only for the very slow predictable motion around the culminating moment, “Aamir” is a tight film with an honest outlook on the preconceived notions developing towards the media news about bombs rooting in India. But more than that is the inch of life in streets, roads and gullies of the Mumbai city. One would not nearly have seen the places in close and with a passionate anger towards this city as director Raj Kumar Gupta has. How one can be manipulated and how it is perceived upon is becoming the bone of contention in films but to take moment about the person who the media says is the culprit is never given a benefit of doubt.

The titular character played by Rajeev Kandelwal comes to Mumbai from London. He is a doctor and with the new immigration policies in UK, he is coming back to homeland after three years. He gets the regular treatment from the customs official and sees the discrimination on two levels. One obviously is the fact of being a Muslim but the other is the discrimination of being an outsider by choice. He has chosen to leave the country and in that become an outsider or an opportunist as it termed. Honestly it is the factor of jealousy which emerges from it. He shrugs it off to see his family waiting outside only to be left stranded as a stranger in homeland. He goes to make a call when two people in a motorbike races and throws him a mobile. From there on he is given instructions to save his family from the hands of a religious fanatic.

There are three prominent things which is not only novel but also tells the aesthetic sense of the director and mainly his uncompromising attribute in presenting it. First is making the city a character, second is making the passer by people as a representation of the situation Aamir is in and the finally the music by Amit Trivedi. Raj Kumar Gupta takes away the Juhu beach or the cosmopolitan region of the city.

Gupta takes us right into the depths of the poverty driven line the films scares to take. I can identify the places because it reminded me of my very first visit to Mumbai. At the age of sixteen and haven’t travelled out of the state, Mumbai is the furthest north of India I went on and it is in the southern part of India. I and my brother were chauffeured by our dad’s assistant and family friend whose wife grew up in Mumbai. She severely warned about the basic amenities missing at her place and we had no idea what is out there and with a complacent attitude brushed those aside. We reached their house in Dharavi. People from Mumbai might know this right away but these are the slum part of the Mumbai. The facilities were next to nothing and the basic requirements of rest room were paid for which you got to walk a mile. The immediate “free” public rest room is something to be not imagined and Raj Kumar Gupta does not shy to put it across the screen. The London returned Aamir is asked to discover clues and craps in those dungeons.

That experience may have constituted a lot in identifying with Aamir’s nightmares. While we both were looked after amazingly well by the people out there, things are not so good for Aamir. The man who moves him like a puppet calls him an escapist and how come he being a Muslim has not even thought about serving his faith and people. And Aamir gives it right back not in speeches but in terse honest opinions. But those are not going to change his plans for the day.

We want him to do heroic things. Aamir wants him to do heroic things. When he is in a hotel room looking on a discovery program of hunting of deer by lions, he smiles when the deer escapes and we expect him to take action. Raj Kumar Gupta teases us with those and immediately says what Aamir can do nothing other than to oblige the commands. The camera looks on the people staring at Aamir with contempt for unknown reasons. The stare is to wonder towards this well dressed man not belonging to this place. What Aamir sees are those faces which ogle him with suspicion, curious and may be surveillance. This paranoid what Aamir goes through is what the audience encounter in guessing an outlet for this poor character.

In spite of such a truthful film, “Aamir” takes its moments of predictability and mainly a lot of slow motion. It does not mean that the effects did not make an impression at the start but it seemed unnecessary and if I may add, mildly dramatized for the tone of the film so far. Gupta poses a view that he desperately wanted the film to elongate and fulfill a period he had in mind. Till then the close up shots and the reaction time of the character made sense and unpredictable but when the time came for it to close up, it became a couch potato. Regardless the ending is disturbing and puts forth the question of innocence of an instigator in a calamity.