The Action Heroine That Wasn’t

HER NAME is Shabana. But pyaar se people don’t call her Shabbo: she is too stern and business-like to have cuddly pet names. What’s not to like about a film which toplines a young woman capable of kicking serious butt? Given producer and writer Neeraj Pandey’s record of ratcheting up the patriotic quotient in his films, it comes as no surprise that Naam Shabana’s leading lady does it for her country.

What does come as a surprise, however, is just how much of a drag the film is. Except for a few stray sequences in which the limber Pannu faces up to the bad guys, and the ones in which co-star Akshay moves in to demonstrate how the big boys do it, there is nothing either novel or interesting about the film. A tiny exchange about Shabana’s ‘religion’, which could have become meaningful and sharp, is muted by dull repartee.

Pannu plays Shabana, a girl with a dark past, who lives with her mother, and who is hand-picked to join a deep-cover intelligence group that appears to have sweeping powers to target — and eliminate (you have only three days! Let’s take him out today!) enemies of the state.

Many of the characters are familiar to us from Pandey’s Baby (2015), including Pannu’s Shabana; Naam Shabana gives us her backstory which involves a troubled childhood and doomed relationship. Pannu left an impression in Baby. In this spin-off, she gets a role many leading ladies would kill for, and she is believable when she is throwing punches, and getting punched in turn, but right through she is strangely held in, and strictly one-note. Did she get stymied by the demands of her part? Was she instructed to keep her mien closed, leaving her much too stiff? Or is she too stretched for her capacity?

The other problem is the plot. Or, more precisely, the lack of it. There’s a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing, from cool European cities to tropical desi locations, as the gang of spies, headed by Bajpayee’s phone-chewing chief, goes after a global arms kingpin who is also involved in trafficking and drugs. But you are left searching for a pulsing storyline. A film which is meant to focus upon the smarts of its leading lady, gives us, instead, such unintentionally hilarious lines as: “women are born spies”. Or words to that effect.

You would think that the dishy Prithviraj Sukumaran’s appearance as the chief villain, togged out in sharp suits, diamond-studded ear, and a gaggle of gun-toting henchmen, would rev things up. But even that reliably excellent actor gets lost in this all- over- theplace, predictable flick.

The final nail is the incessant, annoying background music. It blares non-stop, and makes this film even longer than it is.

Naam Shabana leaves you with a niggling question: why create a heroine in the action hero mode, with both mind and heart, and then give her a big bro to “help” her out? This results in second-guessing your biggest asset, wondering if she is a liability. SG THE ONLY thing higher than the mountains is the skies — pahaad se bhi ooncha sirf gagan — is an old saying. And scaling Mt Everest is the acme of achievement, and excellence.

Poorna, which tells the story of Poorna Malavath, the youngest girl to summit the highest, most iconic peak in the world, is every bit as inspirational and goose-bump inducing as it should be.

A couple of things can mar the re-telling of real-life stories, especially if the subject comes from a disadvantaged background and manages an extraordinary feat. And no one could be more so than Malavath: dirt-poor, female, Adivasi. Young girls, barely past puberty, in her Telangana village (where part of the film is shot, and derives its striking authenticity from) are “married off” before they “become too tall”, as transactions between families.

The recreation on film can be patronising, or it can bump up the protagonist falsely to create a sense of importance. Poorna stays away from these pitfalls: Bose, whose second directorial venture this is, gives us closeness without cloying sentimentality, and saves the triumphal swelling music for the climax, when Poorna makes her unforgettable ascent.

There are some parts which are not as satisfying.