“Taraki karta hua khushaal mulk hai apka. Aap kuch din wapas chale jaiye,” a character tells Jyoti, the besieged protagonist of Akelli, a survival film that spends close to 2 hours justifying its name, and affirming any queasy notions you might have had about wannabe terrorists. It’s also a scene that exposes a film’s desperation to accrue some sort of political relevance when none seems imminent. Akelli is a survival drama that does predictably genre things in between logically preposterous things. It has the requisite dusty palette, an equally impressive sense of scale and arid claustrophobia, but it is far too ecstatic in its service of the film’s only identifiable star - Nushrratt Bharuccha.
Bharuccha plays Jyoti, part of the ground crew at an airline. After she is fired for standing up to a misbehaving passenger – really the only character insight the writers are willing to part with – she desperately searches for a job. Through an agent who exports equally vulnerable men and women to overseas vacancies, she lands work at a garment factory in Mosul. Her introduction to Iraq, its hallowed tresses and caustic present is so immediate, it catches you off-guard. A young girl on its streets is blown to pieces by an explosive, while Jyoti watches on. It’s a scene that suggests the unleashing of a brutal, unceasing encore. It’s obviously disturbing, but also promising by way of the force and nakedness of conflict, our cinema rarely sinks its teeth in. Except everything that follows is an appeasing, at times preposterous, escape story that makes a mockery of the very realism, the film at one point threatens to purport.
Jyoti lands at a garment factory in Mosul, at the time of its imminent fall. The fact that none of this dawns upon foreign imports, is neither acknowledged nor admonished in the way that most stories attempting to circle conflict in this manner ought to. Jyoti is received in this foreign country by Rafique (Nishant Dahiya). A film’s amateurish sense of purpose and pace can be judged from the time it takes to go from a child being blown up by a bomb to a romantic overture aimed at crowning its suffering lead. Therein lies the film’s biggest flaw, its inability to throw Jyoti, an awkward carrier for shock and trauma, into the deep end. An end from where only the body can, ironically, return uncharred.
Akelli’s premise offers the potential to actually explore conflict through the lens of impoverishment and gender. Most people who are lifted out of war-torn countries, end up there by optimistic design as opposed to pragmatic choice. It’s an aspect that Jyoti’s mom and sister back home shoulder, but can’t quite impose on a film that has its sights on becoming an action flick instead. Jyoti kills one leader, kidnaps another, and performs other heroics, in an implausible extraction plan that is built on sterile, dumb doggedness. Not one ragged, gun-wielding masochist puts her out of her misery as a woman, practically, evades an entire militia and with it, logic. There is an argument to be had here about the cockiness of Tiger Shroff’s films, their ridiculous inflation of the heroism as an action star capable of overwhelming armies. Akelli isn’t trying to reproduce a feminine version of it, but can’t quite etch its own little path either. It’s high-decibel, overdramatic, and convenient despite the underpinnings of a sensitive bosom.
Directed by debutant Pranay Meshram, the film at least has a delectable visual palette. Its first scene is a lovely floating retreat from an underground cell to the aerial of a terrorist stronghold. Unfortunately, like other false horizons, the map beyond the first ray of the sun here, is a fumbled mishmash of neither this nor that. After she is thrown into a cell with a couple of under-age girls, Jyoti hallucinates about her young sister back home. It’s the kind of soapy writing that befits the barbed, but brittle nature of domestic conflict. In matters of genocide and dehumanizing wars, writers ought to do better than reduce victims to personal recalls. It reeks of insincerity to identify each thorn for the rose you left behind. Not that Akelli does a good job of exploring that wrenching migration narrative either.
Bharuccha, on whom the film unsparingly rests, eventually becomes the blotch that the narrative can’t quite outgrow. This isn’t necessarily a criticism of her ability to carry a film by herself, but of the treatment that affords her little composition and complexity beyond the spirit of a distressed damsel. Her supporting cast is barely there, appearing as indistinct men who either lustily suck lollipops or menacingly play the mandolin. They are reduced to obstacles in a course Jyoti swats aside, ambling away from certain trouble, indignity and death, in a tale that beggars belief. To the point that you can imagine her getting into a truck and sing “Main nikali, o gaddi leke,” as she tramples borders, geo-political constraints and an entire army of brute men, on her drive back home.
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