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Now that the multi-venue ImagineAsia festival has started and the Satyajit Ray retrospective has opened at London’s National Film Theatre, this week promises to have loads of South Asian movies and this film, by first feature director Asif Kapadia, is an excellent way to make use of the moment. The Warrior is the opening film of this bonanza and it is a strikingly confident piece of film-making, one is left wondering how it is possible to have such an exhilarating stride right at the start of a full-length undertaking. Mid-range production has a wonderful structuring of permutational editing, hovering where the, over confident attempts to produce spectator emotions metamorphose into outright deception. It is a highly, prisimatic evergreen film; and, as he magnificently puts it – the director is pursuing significant quarry and reminds me of the comments Orson Welles provided regarding his adaptation of Macbeth.
In the movie, Irfan Khan plays the role of Lafcadia, who is a warrior in the remote history of India, serving as a privileged bonded servant to a cruel warlord. The warlord has no qualms about publicly decapitating those who do not pay tribute. During the brutal retaliation against the village that has been slow in paying tribute, the warrior goes through an epiphany where he detach himself from the violent practices. He then takes his son and one goes hiking in the mountains. The warlord seeks to control Lafcadia and is deeply angered by the show of disobedience, so he instructs Biswas, another warrior, to either kill Lafcadia or face an undignified death.
The words ‘epic endeavor’ truly do justice to the depth of the movie, followed by the dazzling beauty of Cinematographer Roman Osin’s art along with the breathtaking locations. The scenes proposed by Kapadia are calm yet evocatively full of mystery, accompanied by a fair amount of narrative imagination. One of the beauties that the director crafts beautifully is that the movie conveys an epic tale within the span of 86 minutes, which in turn feels like a miracle. The movie is surprisingly huge on the inside, more than its outside, and yet it also manages to convey a sense of unhurriedness to the audience.
The moral core and enigma of the film profoundly resides in the relationship between Lafcadia and the son. In the start, we can see him annoyed at his son who does not seem to have any talent for martial arts and so it is anticipated that the father son relationship would be the focal point of the film. However, their relationship is disrupted with a violent moment that tears them apart and he is left with a mischievous street orphan whom he picks up as a traveling companion; a child with a missing deep seated moral code who is the worst possible option for a replacement son.
From one perspective, the presence of this boy speaks to the absence of the other and contributes to the man’s suffering and dreadful solitude. In a different light, however he stands for a certain amount of sympathy, the sense that he is somehow the figure of the boy his Gods have sent to represent his own degradation, and that supervising the little pickpocket is a form of penance to an unforgiving destiny. This is made all the more vivid by the chance meeting with a sighted blind old woman: the workings of destiny are made all the more vivid by an encounter with an old, blind woman with second sight and it is like Kapadia is so confident in himself that he can afford to make such bold ventures who states that the street boy is a criminal and the warrior is covered in “blood on his face.”
Kapadia, too, manages to capture this within beautiful imagery. The hurt and loneliness in Lafcadia’s heart is parallelly projected into the landscape and, again, Kapadia manages to find a stunning diversity of places, and, from what seems their primary sites of film location, Jaipur and Jaselmere in Rajasthan: desert, woodland, mountain, all captured with stunning beauty and clarity.
However, the answer to the sprawling sublime images does not rule out a sense of the miniature internal drama of The Warrior. The picture is self consciously a bit of everything – a self claimed classic, and the picture’s look may owe a lot to the greats of the old and new west: One thinks of Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa, and the touch of moral fable – or brutal masculine interaction being acted out on a barren desert or flat scrub land pays homage to Lean or Ford.
Turner’s reproduction of the cast’s overlapping dialogues is uneducated but deliberate, while the senator’s speeches were too stilted to target the audience effectively. Most critics agree that Turner lacks confidence in his ability in the final stage of the film, perhaps chronologically after the last fight between Biswas and Lafcadia, which Kapadia positions well in front of the last credits. The chase parts were finessed in the beginning on the setting of Hong Kong as I would have preferred the interviewer to provide some commentary at a much later stage. All things said, I got carried away by the rest of the narrative presentation on how the rest of the action is allowed to unfold. One conclusion I reached was that this conflict between warriors is perhaps not so important when placed against the scenery that surrounds us Consulting The Warrior.
In an era where the great majority of English-speaking commercial cinema is mired in formulas, set types that have already seen their best days and crumbling hooks and nails, this movie is a pleasant surprise, not only for the ideas presented and the problem of how to tackle them in a brutally honest way rather superbly, but thanks for its penetration and clarity. There is in some way a literary reflex to the movie: the narrative style of bordering on imagines which was in vogue in fiction about a decade ago but showing an access to the mysterious interior story of the protagonist. This first movie of Asif Kapadia is a triumph of sorts and as expected, a satisfying drama comprehensively rich and with a simple visual imagery. Keep an eye on this talent because this film will turn heads.
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