Valley and the valiant

It’s Kashmir once again. In real and reel. As we are trying to recover from the shocking Pahalgam terror attack, Tejas Prabha Vijay Deoskar’s directorial ‘Ground Zero’ takes us back to the 2001 Parliament attack and its aftermath, when BSF officer Narendra Nath Dubey (Emraan Hashmi) embarks on a two-year mission to uncover the mastermind behind the operation — Ghazi Baba.

Set in Srinagar of 2001, ‘Ground Zero’ comes with the disclaimer: ‘fiction based on real events’. It relies heavily on information which is already in the public domain, and Deoskar tells his story as it is — with facts, without jingoism. And this detour from the current style of storytelling, which is full of hyper-nationalism at the cost of facts, is pretty refreshing. The second refreshing element in this 2-hour-14-minute saga is Emraan Hashmi. It’s a comeback worth waiting for. Playing Dubey, a duty-bound officer who not only feels for Kashmir but Kashmiris too, and wants to change the mindset of the wayward youth, he looks sincere and is endearing.

While his character stands out, unfortunately, the screenplay does not. Stone-pelters graduating to become trigger-happy pistol gang members, chasing the chief of Jaish-e-Mohammed, Ghazi Baba (Rocky Raina), the Parliament attack, the Akshardham attack, the plot strings all that and more. The result is a fractured narrative that jumps from one moment to another. It feels like a test of our attention span.

The writers try to build tension by introducing a major plot point here and there, but even before we can apply our mind and connect to the problem at hand, they come up with a solution and move on to the next. The investigation looks too easy, the planning of RAW and BSF too simple and predictable.

Codes that Ghazi Baba sends out to his cadres are cracked immediately, a pistol gang member, Hussain (Mir Mohammed Mehroos), who tries to kill Dubey, is nabbed and turned into an informer without much effort. Sniffing out Ghazi, who is supposed to be an elusive figure, seems like child’s play. In fact, Dubey, tired of bureaucratic red-tapism, seeks a transfer to Indore. But he doesn’t need much convincing to change his mind and stay in Srinagar to bring an end to Ghazi’s reign of terror.

The makers and editors seem to be in a hurry to tell the tale. The cuts sometimes are so abrupt and so drastic that it takes a while to connect the scenes.

Not much emphasis has been given to the side characters. Sai Tamhankar as Dubey’s wife Jaya and Zoya Hussain as Aadila get very little to do, but Sai manages to make an impact with her monologue in one of the scenes as she confronts the media. Ghazi, the elusive antagonist, remains elusive. Despite the fact that one heinous act after another takes place, we don’t see much of him in action.

The serenity of Kashmir juxtaposed with the volatility of the political situation is an interesting aspect which could have been explored with a little more finesse. To give credit to cameraperson Kamaljeet Negi, Kashmir is captured in its full glory — snow, old city area, traditional buildings, meandering roads… But somehow, these frames do not integrate the region’s political and emotional turmoil. Here, the good, bad and the ugly all stand independent of one another, making the narrative lose its fluidity.

The film ends on a happy note with the postscript as to how, after the Ghazi operation, the situation has improved in the Valley. Something we would have loved to believe… But can we really?

Movie Review