iREVIEW: Maachis

Starring Om Puri, Chandrachoor Singh, and Tabu. Written and Directed by Gulzar.

I've always wondered what makes a movie good, or going even a notch higher, what makes a good movie great. Entertainment might be the foundation of all good movies but I believe the components in the film forming the platform for a rib chilling entertainer differentiates a good weekender from all time greats. If I had to filter out ten great movies that Bollywood has ever produced, Maachis would definitely be one of them (another movie being Vaastav).

Maachis is based on insurgency of Sikh terrorists, or religious warriors as some refer to them as, in Punjab after 1984 Sikh riots. The film features a pithy screenplay about the life of just another Sikh youth, Kirpal Singh, who joins a militant group out of shear vengeance and rage towards the incompetent government with ultimate aspirations of assassinating two top league police officers who brutally tortured Kirpal's best friend, Jaswant Singh Randhawa. Maachis is great because it's not just another biopic of a terrorist or a mere documentation of the horrific anti-Sikh riots. In fact, there is no sequence in the film that even mentions the 1984 riots, let alone depict them.

The film, realizing much dire problems at hand than just communalism, instills its focus on the transformation of an innocent youth into a deadly terrorist. I've always believed that great movies, no matter how topically they might pretend to be, are in-depth analysis and thesis of a microcosmic world that resides in our houses, our minds and our relationships. Maachis is one such story about a typical resultant of an unjust system manifesting itself in a renegade, Kirpal, and Kirpal's fiancee, Veera, representing a class of citizens choosing to remain conservatives and move on in their lives despite of all the atrocities, mind it by choice and not by force.

Maachis brims with some high class scenes and heart wrenching dialogues, a lot of them by Om Puri trying its best to clarify the objectives of his revolt and of the film as well. It filters Maachis as not a film about Sikhs and the hardships they've face during post Indira Gandhi period but rather displaying its strength in the commonality of all the riots, holocausts, genocides and genesis of terrorism thereafter making it a true understanding of humans and their conflicts against any kind of suppression. Anti-Sikh riots, I believe, is the background and that's just about it.

Last but not the least, Maachis is probably one of the first hindi films to follow a non-linear format. There are two parallel stories in the film: one is the present when Kirpal is a well known militant and the other is his past and his transformation into who he is today. Not once do we feel this is just a story of Kirpal or just a story about militants or how they came into being or just about anti-Sikh riots or just about unjust system or just about Veera-Kirpal's innocent relationship. In fact, Maachis is one of those few stories which is about everything that defines humans.

***** / *****