Tahaan (2008)

The film is about the Kashmir of today, family, cross-border terrorism, good and evil, unlikely friendships, and contains more than its fair share of philosophy. The journey itself, mercifully enough, doesn’t hold any such lofty pretensions: Young Tahaan traverses the wilderness and the weather because he wants to get back his donkey.

And it’s a spellbinding trip, this movie.

The ‘problem’ with trying to analyse a film directed by a genius cinematographer is that even when narrative slows down or ‘filler’ shots are thrown indulgently into the mix, Santosh Sivan makes the whole film look so bloody enchanting that you have no room to complain about the slightest possible niggles. If indeed there exist mistakes, and they are this visually captivating, then give us a tapeful of bloopers — we’ll eat it up.

Capturing Kashmir with a raw eloquence and a very fluid camera, Sivan goes at it mostly up-close, preferring to linger on the boy and his fellow supporting actors, occasionally cutting to natives with faces dripping of character. And then, without warning, he’ll pull back and open wide — and our jaws will drop, because Kashmir is really as startlingly beautiful as it gets.

He’s shot in similar climes before — most memorably in Mani Ratnam’s visually astonishing Dil Se — but here everything is quiet and understated. It is Kashmir yet it is backdrop, the director seems to want to emphasise, and his intentions must be appreciated greatly. However, what a helluva backdrop it is.

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