Pathaan

dir: Siddharth Anand

2023

I have been on something of an Indian film kick lately, and I think I’m pretty much at the end of it, for now. I know nothing about this franchise, or about anything surrounding these flicks, other than the “real” world stuff around them, and as such I am as uninterested in watching nationalistic propaganda that is pro-India as I am to watch any nationalistic bullshit that’s pro any country. Also, this is India’s biggest box office flick of the year, and the second biggest flick in Hindi of all time. So someone went to see it, lots of patriotic someones.

Your countries and their governments are all equally worthless and self-serving, in my eyes, so fuck all y’all.

But within a certain context, I can allow for that kind of bullshit, when it suits the setting and a narrative – in other contexts it can be almost inspiring - hence my enjoyment for the equally implausible Indian film R R R that came out last year and wowed audiences. It worked because the Indian heroes (yay!) were fighting the colonialist and cruel British (boo!).

Here, the heroes are conspicuously Hindu Indian, and the villains are kinda Pakistani Muslims, and former Indian heroes turned villains who renounce their homeland. And they’re fighting over Kashmir, so…

Agents who die in service of their country in this movie yell “Jai Hind!” before they die, which doesn’t translate to but means “Long Live India!” The villain routinely mocks the hero for loving “Mother India”, which he feels isn’t worthy of that love. In the flick’s creepiest and least comprehensible scene, the villainous Jim (John Abraham) tells the hero that he never thought of India as his mother, and more of as a lover, and I was like “the fuck is this idiot talking about? What weird nationalistic incest bullshit is he peddling?”

This villain is meant to be intimidating. He has a neck tattoo that says “Patriot”. He wants to kill lots of Indians because… He then decides to kill lots of Pakistanis because… he just wants to watch the world burn?

He’s dull, dull as dishwater. I routinely see scarier people than this villain on public transport. But they didn’t make their way into this film, which is probably a good thing, because that level of realism would be both terrifying and depressing.

Jim is not a supervillain, but he might as well be, because until the very end of the flick he is in complete control of everything that happens, except for that fateful last 2 seconds save by the hero. And this is a long arse film, so for over two and a half hours you’re wondering “how is it that they haven’t killed off this goober yet?”

Well, because the hero is taking his time. And who is the hero in question? It’s the mighty Pathaan, played by the even more mighty superstar Shah Rukh Khan.

How mighty is Pathaan? Whenever Pathaan is not on screen, which is not often, people are always talking about Pathaan, and what he might be doing, or what he’s going to do, or generally complementing him on his world-saving ways and incredible hair. People just can’t not talk about him, he’s that crucial and magnetic.

There are a lot of special effects in the flick, but the most special effects that caught and would not let go of my eyes is the sheer quantity of scenes where people are (offscreen) presumably holding fans or hairdryers ensuring that his goddamn hair is being artfully suspended as he completes a jump or a roundhouse kick, or shoots fourteen people in the face while sliding down a rope or an avalanche or jumping out of a car crash. It is absurd beyond the point of absurdity.

If the following that I write means anything to you, then you’ll know exactly what my level of bafflement derives from: quite often Pathaan is dressed kinda like Steven Tyler from Aerosmith, and just like a lead singer in a 1980s video, when he’s in motion always has a flow of air blowing in his face in order to maximise the awesomeness of his hair.

And don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot going on with that hair, with that rich, voluminous, luxurious hair. Just thick and long enough for a topknot / man-bun, but let’s never put it in a straight forward and practical ponytail. That’s not masculine enough. That’s not Pathaan enough. His hairstyle at any given moment is so complex and so important that it can spontaneously change even within the one scene.

It’s so important that the very last moments of this movie, the very last words of dialogue, involve Pathaan telling his boss that he needs to go to a hairdresser, not for a haircut, but for a shampoo.

Like, I’m all for healthy masculine role models being comfortable enough to joke about their sensitive needs, so maybe this is a step forward? Shah Ruck Khan has for decades been so comfortable with being a…whatever he is that he’s never had difficulty playing a foppish kind of dandy in between what is now becoming his signature muscular action persona.

Muscular guys in their fifties? Jeez, you’re really making this ‘graceful decline’ harder for the old folks. There are so many scenes of either hero or villains physique’s that I really wonder what demographic they’re really aiming for.

What’s most amazing to me is that a massive potential box office (with the Indian market), an enthused audience, advances in technology and bigger budgets basically means India can now make jingoistic flicks as loud, overly long and dumb as anything that Hollywood was making in the 1980s.

This flick, with all its cribbing from the Mission: Impossible movies and the Fast & the Furious “saga”, is not really that much of an advancement from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Commando.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Commando. In some ways, it’s the most perfectly perfect action film ever made. In other, more accurate, ways, it’s a film so fucking stupid it comes back all the way back around to being “pretty okay” again.

Of all the scenes I could refer to, the definitive image is of Arnie holding a machine gun with one arm and firing it, killing scores of stupid soldiers who just run into all those bullets.

This here contemporary action film has two muscly guys holding those rotating minigun cannons on the top of a train, casually, one armed, shooting hundreds of stupid Russian soldiers happily throwing themselves at our heroes’ bullets.

I don’t even know if it’s one-upmanship, two-upmanship or even more, since they blow up the train soon after, and have to jump off the back of it which shows the filmmakers gave up on physics even sooner and in an even more acrimonious break up than when the jerks behind the Fast & the Furious films figured out their audiences are too stupid to understand why none of what they’re watching makes any sense.

But who cares? Who should care? Do the people this flick is aimed at care? Clearly not.

They went to see Shah Rukh Khan kill a bunch of people and then wave his man-bun around, and he definitely did all of that.

Plus there’s a love interest! Did I mention the love interest, in a film and a culture where if they actually embraced or kissed people would burn down the cinemas across the nation? I mean, people still set fires and tore down posters (over the colour of a dress the love interest wears, I’m not making that up), but they didn’t kill too many people, at least.

Deepika Padukone plays Rubai, an ISI agent (Pakistani intelligence), and she introduces her character to us, the stunned and stunted viewers in the audience, with a song in which she claims that she is such a free spirit, and a nasty one at that, that whenever she has thoughts of modesty, she swiftly discards them, just like her tight clothing. I’m not joking, there is the literal lyric where she says it, as she dances fairly modestly for the camera. I think a bit of midriff is visible. Quickly, get the smelling salts, grandma has just fainted at all this salaciousness!

Really, I am loathe to use descriptive language like this, but she is objectified into being a total jezebel. For most of the film she’s pretty much a sexy villain, and of course if you can’t see the betrayal she’s setting Pathaan up for when they’re stealing something from the Russians – congratulations, you’ve just watched your first movie. Well done, staying awake that long.

But then her love of (Indian) life and of course Pathaan compels her to change her wicked, immodest ways while flitting around the world in order to get Pathaan’s attention.

Yes, the flick globetrots, from Africa (they don’t specify a country, just “Africa”) to India to Russia to Italy to Spain to France to Afghanistan to all these places and you wonder why Australia didn’t get a look in for some reason. To little effect, there’s no real point or purpose to the trotting. It looks like a bunch of commercials for a number of products, like instant coffee or maybe some mid range label like Zara. It’s not high end stuff, and mostly it’s there to flatter its presumed middle class audience with places they might get temporary working visas to.

When Pathaan fights people all over the world, a suspicious number of them speak (dubbed) Hindi, which he often compliments them on. When he’s speaking important, clipped sentences with his boss (Dimple Kapadia), or her boss (Ashutosh Rana), they speak serious English sentences, just to show how fucking serious they are, with the language of seriousness.

Why would they show antagonists around the world speaking Hindi, and the serious people keeping India safe from Pakistan’s machinations speaking English? What weird kind of pro-Indian post-colonialism shit is this, and what’s it meant to mean?

I have no real idea, but it probably means something. I mean, there’s also a bonkers reason for why the hero and the flick are called Pathaan. The hero, Pathaan, is so named because he saved like a school full of kids while on a mission in Afghanistan, and, after being severely wounded (he spends a lot of the film severely wounded), he is adopted by these simple good hearted people, who are, you guessed it, an ethnicity called Pathaan, which is synonymous with Pashtun. There are a lot of Pathan / Pashtun people in Afghanistan, and in India, and I guess elsewhere now.

Why is an Indian Hindi speaker, who’s taken the name of Pathaan, the only man that can save India from a bad man employed by a Pakistani general enraged by stuff going on in Kashmir, a place that India, Pakistan and China have been fighting over for decades?

Whatever. The reason is – whatever. It doesn’t fucking matter. It’s like trying to work out what Dom Toretto really means when he uses the word “family” in the Fast & the Furious movies: It means everything, and nothing at the same time. Used judiciously in between cars smashing into other cars, trucks, planes or being catapulted into space, family means nothing. It’s the excuse for everything, and the solution to nothing.

This is jingoistic, nationalistic crap. This is knock-off Fast Mission: Furious Impossible bullshit, and smells like it too. The performances are hammy and over the top, and absurd, like in wrestling, and the film doesn’t suffer for it at all. The people that will love this mindless stuff will really love it, and those hoping for a meaningful film about ethnic conflict or human connection will be left sadly wanting.

I still enjoyed it. I even laughed at the dumb jokes. The dumber the joke, the more I laughed.

Let’s not pretend it’s anything that clever, though. Let’s not go that far.

7 times it must be glorious to kill non-Indians for the glory of India out of 10

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"Ask not what your country should do for you, but what you should do for your country!" - a famous line of dialogue from that famous Indian statesman, John F Kennedy - Pathaan