It is not a crime to make a bad film. But the latest instalment to the YRF Spy Universe, ‘Alpha’, is not a badly made film. It’s an ethically compromised film that thinks a certain format is box office “friendly”.
The YRF Spy Universe once made an Indian and a Pakistani sit across a table and eat tangadi kebab possible on Indian screens (‘Ek Tha Tiger’). And this is also the reality. Pakistanis and Indians function very normally outside their own geographies. When my cousin moved to London, the first friend he made was from Pakistan. And they used to bond over food, movies and music.
In a short story titled ‘Mehdi Hasan in Vienna’ from the short story collection ‘The Other in the Mirror: Stories from India and Pakistan’, two individuals from either sides of the border sit bonding over many things India and Pakistan continue to share. The protagonist goes to a grocery store to pick up a few cans of his favourite beer from India and some rare Pakistani CDs of Mehdi Hasan’s ghazals.
Emotions like this made the spy franchise so human. Beneath all the espionage and violence, the franchise never forgot that the protagonists are human beings first. Log toh log hi hote hai… Of course, the YRF spy films did carry nationalism on its sleeve. They weren’t devoid of it. But they never saw patriotism and empathy as two different things.
In ‘Pathaan’, when Rubai tells Pathaan, main ek soldier hoon, apne watan ke liye kuch bhi kar sakta hun, magar ye, karodon masoom logonki maut, yeh meri jung nahi hai (I am a soldier and I can do anything for my country. But not at the cost of the lives of innocent civilians), there is something poignant about it. The film allows her to be guided by a moral compass that transcends national identity. Even Jim has a story. He is a soldier who was let down by his own country.
And in the end of these films, you are not happy because India or Pakistan won but because innocent lives were saved. However, ‘Alpha’ is a plain one note depiction of India-Pakistan relations. It presents a binary and a very convenient picture. Its worldview leaves little room for moral ambiguity. Even if we leave alone the fact that ‘Alpha’ goes against the philosophy of the franchise, does it truly uphold the philosophy of the man behind the banner?
Yash Chopra never stopped carrying Lahore with him. Though Partition separated him from his homeland, he had expressed a deep affection for his birthplace. This sense of belonging and nostalgia for the culture and landscapes of his childhood home profoundly shaped his life and influenced his cinematic vision.
‘Veer-Zaara’ was an ode to undivided India. It breaks one’s heart to see the banner produce a black and white narrative of India-Pakistan relations. Perhaps this is the post-Dhurandhar era. However, the tragedy is not that jingoistic films exist. But that even filmmakers who once resisted that impulse have begun to embrace it.
The banner that once said ‘aisa hi des hai mera, jaisa des hai tera’, seems less interested in that possibility anymore.