"Black and White" (Language - Hindi) (2008) - Movie Review

The loud message of unity in the country of India is another free pass taken on poor film making. Subhash Ghai gives a film rosy and overly dramatic and utterly unconvincing story of a terrorist infiltrating a locality in New Delhi to get into the August 15th Red Fort celebration of Independence Day to of course blow it up. The message, it is always about the message and the great intention of the director which would woo the audience. I would admire the intention but not the film making of “Black and White”.

From Afghanistan with name and profile change starts Numair Qazi (Anurag Sinha), a zealot and idiotically religious fanatic who keeps a stern face and is the hope of the terrorist organization to do their mission. He does not hesitate to shoot any member of his team for not being truly religious. He has issues and his seem to be more of misanthropic than an obsession over religion. And then there is Professor Rajan Mathur (Anil Kapoor) and his overly vocal wife Roma Mathur (Shefali Chhaya), the flag bearers of relentless harmony in the area of Chandini Chouk. Numair will get into the good books of the family which would be the 130th unconvincing moments in a film of countless plot holes and it has gone only half the way.

The film begins at the date of August 1st and has fourteen days for Numair to orchestrate the cruel act. The film in the scenes and running time made me feel like three months. Apart from the dragging screenplay, the time line of events definitely goes unsynchronized to extend beyond those fourteen days. In those fourteen days, a young woman Shagufta (Aditi Sharma) would fall in love with this guy for no other reason than he is tall, handsome and kind of unattainable, Rajan and Roma would pull strings to get Numair a pass and yes, in between that the intelligence department will get the right information at the nick of time. I forgot to mention many concerts, album releases, and arrest of the spearhead Naeem Sheikh (Arun Bakshi). A small advice to the cinema intelligence officers, if some criminal says to wait for five minutes for his/her prayer, it is suggested to send a guard with her/him.

Among these stupidities lie some performances unused and necessary characters wasted. There is no forum for discussion and all we get is a lecture from the professor. He is the cheerful and naïve guy who believes the goodness in every one. I accept that personality but how far the film makes him alive in such a serious issue which depends on the culpability of the screenplay. Rajan Mathur is some one is projected as god like character who seem to exist in this plane wherein he crosses the line of believability when he acts so unaware of this dubious personality he hardly knows for less than fifteen days (as the movie claims). Even despite the film’s great effort to time warp it, the connection never makes sense. Also why does a character after finishing a dialogue and turns away to go always has something to say as though the director acted it out to be that way? Despicable!

As one character says, money is the key and nothing else matters. Human survival becomes the end and that is the true dialogue in an unnecessarily dramatic and goofy film marching with the agenda of sugary unity. It just does not add up and it never worked at all. The real problem never gets addressed. The real motivation for this young man is more than religion and more than the childhood experience. The purpose in the film is his realization of learning the good people in a country he has brought up to hate. He sees the faces behind those flamed skins and that makes him human. That is the screenplay’s intentions which are indeed good but the face of Anurag Sinha needs less beard and more acting to do that.

Subhash Ghai has produced and directed this film gathering many praises from critics for the opting of simplicity over his grand gala revelries of emotions. Ghai definitely goes out of his path in trying to make some thing unusual for him but with an approved confidence on the concept than on the screenplay. I found no difference between our tamizh hero “Captain” Vijaykanth slapping a terrorist and advising him on the equality and Rajan Mathur explaining his reasons to Shagufta in the end. Both are unbelievable, cheesy and give a sugar pill with no effect whatsoever.