It’s a miracle, John Abraham is still acting in films 22 years after his debut in Jism (2003). This isn’t a snarky comment on his limited chops as an actor, as much as his risk appetite in an industry that is too busy holding on to fleeting good times and too happy to repeat its successes. Few actors have visibly lived the ‘one for them, one for me’ maxim (working with as varied a list like Anurag Kashyap, Deepa Mehta, Shoojit Sircar to Rohit Dhawan, Anees Bazmee and Milap Zaveri) with as much gusto as the 53-year-old star.
Abraham has seen a few successes, but he’s endured gargantuan failures. In Abraham, there is an insecure star constantly probing the market for his commercial viability (he’s produced most recent films through his production house, JA Entertainment), but there’s also a curious actor constantly trying to prove his mettle.
This dichotomy in Abraham also finds itself in his latest film, The Diplomat.
Based on true incidents that took place in 2017, the film tells the story of one Uzma Ahmed who was tricked by a man called Tahir to come with him to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (in Northern Pakistan) where he holds her hostage and forces her to marry him. Directed by Shivam Nair, in The Diplomat, Uzma is played by Sadia Khateeb, who appeared in Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Shikara (2019), while Tahir is played by Jagjeet Sandhu – who broke out into the mainstream audiences in Paatal Lok season one. Abraham plays J.P. Singh, the deputy chief at the Indian embassy in Islamabad, who is listening to Uzma’s pleas to be repatriated to India.
In here, there’s a slick thriller, whose legs are repeatedly cut off by the ideological reverence a film must observe to have an unhindered release these days. The ‘special thanks’ to S. Jaishankar, and the kin of late Sushma Swaraj (the current and former foreign ministers) at the film’s start, should’ve been adequate warning.
What’s frustrating is how competent the film appears for a long time, before finally giving up and resorting to the kind of dog-whistling (most industry insiders would argue is) ‘needed’ for a film to be successful these days. Abraham is intent on not letting his overt masculinity take over – trying to play a thinking man and someone light on his feet. He even introduces a sense of humour to take our attention away from that usually sullen face and the buffed-up body of his.
Written by Ritesh Shah (behind mindful films like Pink, Faraaz, and Sardar Udham), Nair’s film flits in and out of the writer’s oeuvre. In moments, it showcases the doggedness of a procedural – but then it also makes surprising creative choices to further popular agendas. For example: the way it sees the men of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as savages might not be faulty. But it sees them only as savages – who treat women like livestock, rape them, and beat them up after facing even the slightest resistance. They’re also dumb enough to be easily seduced with sex and money.
A screengrab from The Diplomat.
There was a similar plotline in Shoaib Mansoor’s Khuda Kay Liye (2007), which was handled with a bit more nuance. At this point, reiterating the narrative of the barbaric and abusive Muslim husband feels opportune and convenient. While it might work to show Islamic dogmatism in such a feral manner, I’d doubt the makers would be equally merciless while showcasing Hindu dogmatism. Or let religion overshadow the character if the abusive husband was a Hindu man.
The Diplomat seems at war with itself – wanting to be Argo, while also trying to cater to the audience of The Kerala Story. It does well in the film’s final stretch when Uzma has to be escorted from Islamabad to the Wagah Border – a journey of a few hundred kms. Despite the court’s orders for the local police to provide security, the convoy is threatened by the volatile comrades of Tahir effortlessly shown as gun-toting men, who kill women for sport, and listen to the ISI like dutiful fifth-graders. Each time someone tells Abraham about possible tails behind their car, or how complex and sensitive circumstances are, he responds with ‘Beta, yeh Pakistan hai’ (Son, this is Pakistan) followed by a spiel that feels more confident than it should.
In a film so intent on never taking a beat, I was moved by Kumud Mishra, playing lawyer Sayed sahab, who is empathetic to the Indian embassy’s legal wants and needs. He fights Uzma’s case, and while countering the prosecution lawyer’s sarcastic arguments – Mishra uses his soft-spoken manner to suggest “inhe vapas India jaane dena chahiye (she should be allowed to go back to India)” – an antithesis to how filmy lawyers behave in the big courtroom scenes.
Alas, this softness is buried deep and long forgotten by the time the makers choose to end the film with the actual footage (borrowed from Asian News International – ANI) making sure the incident is intended as a victory lap for the BJP government. At some point in the film, someone says how Uzma’s case should not be seen through the Indo-Pak angle, but from a humanitarian angle. Now only if naya Bollywood took its own advice.
