Lakshya

I have to admit I experienced a very mixed reaction to the film "Lakshya."  On the one hand, the film has great acting, great photography, great staging, and virtually everything one could want from a big budget picture.  The male lead does everything his role requires(the moment he learns his love interest is engaged to another man and reacts as though he had been stabbed in the guts is perhaps his finest moment).  The female lead is beautiful, both before and after haircut, and she very much projects a woman in charge of her own destiny.  (She's enough to set a globalization apologist's heart a-flutter, truly.)  The sheer kinetic rush of this film will win one over.  The scene where the isolated soldiers scale the face of the mountain is ,plain and simple , a great piece of filmmaking - I loved it when the hero told one of the other soldiers just to not look down.  The hero's struggle, in effect, to become a hero is interesting and well-told.  However, some things strick in my craw here.  The film, for one thing, seems patronizing about the female lead's pacifism.  I thought her position deserved a bit more respect than it got here.  The scene where all the soldiers are going off to combat gave me double deja-vu, as it were.  On the one hand, it's full of the jingoism that Hollywood used to crank out during the Second World War.  Not being stupid, the filmmakers don't hesitate to show the viewer the horrors of combat in unflinching fashion.  While I'm glad they had the courage not to fudge this, there is an element of trying to have things both ways here.  As usual in Indian thrillers, the film emphasises the national unity of India's almost bewildering ethnic/religious diversity in the face of crisis.  While the film doesn't do this badly, I have seen Indian films which approach this topic in a more probing way.  The intellectual/personal journey of the male lead might strike some satirical thoughts in Western viewers.  On the one hand, it might remind them of those godawful American military 'be all you can be in the Army' ads.  On the other hand, it might also remind them of that dreadful eighties Yank film "Stripes."  In all fairness to the filmmakers, Nietzsche would probably have approved of the filmmakers' idea of the military as character-builder - afraid I can't embrace that one.  The film's nationalism is problematic to me.  Let's just say that while we should embrace and treasure our differences, we shouldn't let them stand between us and other people.  'Nuff said on that score.  One very deep matter troubles me here.  This film depicts a border conflict between India and Pakistan.  Both countries are nuclear powers, a heartbeat away from the Ultimate Horror.  Any conflict between the two countries has the potential to escalate to Nuclear War.  Any nuclear exchange between these two countries would be a crime not  just against their respective populations but a crime against all humanity.  (In case you think no one in the developed world cares or pays attention.)  There is absolutely no sense of all this in this film.  Just a sentence or two would have upped the dramatic ante here. It's the filmmakers' call and they obviously chose not to do this.  All I can say is that in a nuclear world, War just isn't what it used to be.  'Nuff said.  The film is very well done and I recommend it as entertainment.  It's worth seeing for the mountain-scaling scene alone.  But if some things stick in your craw here, you might do well to ponder them.  That's my take, anyway...Greg Cameron, Surrey, B.C., Canada