THE TERRORIST
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Phaedra Cinema Director: Santosh Sivan Writer: Ravi Deshpande, Vijay Devashwar, Santosh Sivan Cast: Ayesha Dharkar, Bhanu Prakash, Sonu Susupal, Vishnu Vardhan, Vinshwa
Whoever said that girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice never met Malli, the title character of Santosh Sivan's searing portrayal of a teen-age terrorist brainwashed into thinking that she is doing something beneficial for her people. Filming in the Indian states Madras and Kerala with all dialogue in the Tamil language, Santosh graphically represents a 19-year-old beauty who can look you right in the eye for several moments, then fire off a few rounds from her machine gun straight into your head. And if you should turn you back on her, don't be surprised to find a club cracking your skull not once but a dozen times or so. Malli is not the first young woman that the movies portray as a murderer. Bridget Fonda did a wonderful job some years ago in John Badham's "Point of No Return." But she is one of the few females we have seen on the screen who allegedly commits her assassinations for political reasons. Malli, played in a clear-eyed, sincere way by the lovely Ayesha Dharkar, is a recruit for a terrorist group in India fighting against its own allegedly repressive government. The film could not have been introduced to the U.S. in a more timely way, given the recent hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane by a trio of guerrillas who demanded the release of Kashmiris held in Indian jails.
While the Rajiv Gandhi assassination was the starting point for director Sivan's film, he shows Malli and a group of women about her age in a guerrilla training camp to be lacking a real footing in politics. Though she is told that what she is doing is for "her people," she is uneducated and naive, her real motive being to avenge the death of her brother at the hands of an Indian soldier. That being the case, Sivan tells us nothing about the nature of the so-called political repression in India today, focusing all of his attention on the title character who is simply adored by Sivan's camera. (The director does the lensing himself in what he calls a no-budget film using non-professional actors who acquit themselves expertly--so much so that one wonders whether actors are born and whether acting schools make that much difference!)
Taking in the lovely colors of the southeastern Indian states of Madras and Kerala, Sivan shows Malli joining the same group that captivated her slain brother, eagerly volunteering and competing with a half dozen of her peers to take on a suicide mission. With a lunch meeting with the leader deemed a sufficient payment for agreeing to give up her life, Malli is praised as future martyr who'd always be remembered by the Indian people. She is then sent on a odyssey to a place in which a VIP is to hold a brief ceremony. Her task is to place a garland around the important man's neck and then to detonate plastic explosives tied about her waist.
Having carried out thirty successful missions against the Indian army, Malli confidently follows the path to the designated town and, in the movie's one decent thrust at comic relief forms a relationship with an eccentric farmer with whom she is housed, dining with him, in that brief time essentially relating to him as though he were her grandfather. It's not long before her humanity competes with her blood lust. For the remainder of the movie Sivan keeps his audience eager to learn whether Malli will carry through her leader's plan to blow herself and her appointed victim up or surrender to her compassion for life for the first time in her adolescent life.
As Malli, Ayesha Dharkar doesn't talk much, which is all to the good. Her facial gestures tell us what goes on in her mind, with Sivan wisely selecting close-up photography for a good part of the story. Dharkar is most sympathetic when she takes a shower and examines her nails and long hair, and when she inspects some photos on the wall of the farmer's cottage, pretending that she is a debutante primping to meet her admirers. Instead of dialogue, for the most part, she murmurs and moans incessantly and breathes heavily, to the extent that a guy entering the theater with closed eyes might believe he's watching "Debbie Does Dallas" rather than "Malli Does Madras." All in all, "The Terrorist" is effective cinema, showing what a talented director can accomplish with just a few rupees and a dedicated crew able to take their assignments without real compensation and to portray their characters in an unaffected manner.
Not Rated. Running Time: 95 minutes. (C) 2000 Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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