Lamhaa: The Untold Story of Kashmir

This movie has zero entertainment value. The cinematography is beautiful, but the rest of the movie falls short.

The editing and the story telling fall short and it is tough to decide if the movie was a documentary or a commercial movie.

Best to avoid, unless you're an ardent Sanjay Dutt fan!

Everyone, says someone important in this searing document of our times, is playing politics in the Kashmir Valley. In a milieu of all-pervasive politics, thank the Lord for a creative voice that can look into the burning Valley with dispassionate compassion.

Lamhaa is one of those docu-dramas that could have easily toppled into the territory of over-statement and over-simplified politics. And boy, haven't we seen that happen in very successful political cinema in recent times?! Rahul Dholakia who earlier made the gently persuasive Parzania on the aftermath of the Gujarat riots, doesn't lose his storytelling equilibrium even when the sitiuations of crises described by the skilfully-written plot scream for attention.

Restraint and honesty go hand-in-hand in Dholakia's Kashmir, which we'd like to believe, is the real Kashmir, unalloyed, non-magnified, intense and utterly devoid of artifice.

The camera moves restlessly through the dangerous crowded main roads and tense bylanes of Kashmir where anything can happen.

The cinematographer James Fowlds seems to know the Valley of the damned with the transparent scrupulousness of an insider who can place himself outside the explosive bustle of a portion of earth that's rapidly slipped into the stratosphere of anarchy and mayhem.

The high-octane screenplay has no space or time to shed tears for the innocent and the dead. Miraculously liberated of overt sentimentality Lamhaa moves with candour and confidence through a world whose politics has become progressively impossible for the outsider to comprehend. Dholakia's narrative moves through a labyrinth of pain and violence without trying to make common sense of them.

Lamhaa is not an easy film to watch. It comes to no decisive end. It takes into consideration the entire politics of Kashmir without careening towards excessive drama.This is that rare political drama where every component in the jigsaw of politics and terrorism is put on screen with a sensitivity and precision that repudiate melodramatic excesses.

A word of special praise for Mithoon's songs. The lyrically lush tunes break into the deafening sound of bomb blasts and roaring guns to remind us that once the best poets of Kashmir wrote poetry on the beauty of the Valley.

Lamhaa is a sincere attempt, sadly ruined by the not-so engaging screenplay. Once we are into the movie, we see each and every 'Lamhaa' is lagging, :( Rahul Dholakia, the national award for his work 'Parzania' has doubtlessly done so much of research for the movie, he deserves appreciation for that, but the way he moulded his research and fiction has terribly gone wrong, resulting what 'Lamhaa' is now.

Lamhaa, as mentioned in the tagline, is obviously the 'Untold story of Kashmir', for it doesn't go much into the natural beauty of Kashmir, which is, otherwise portrayed in every movie based on Kashmir, regardless of whether it is a terrorist story, or whatever. The dialogues are written brilliantly, some one-line dialogues make strong impact in the minds. But the movie as a whole, is a boring affair. Only grace is the climax, the last 10 minutes. The OST was excellently composed by Mithoon, but all of them are not used well in the movie. Salaam Zindagi track is picturised beautifully.

The actors do their part well, all were good in their roles.

On the whole, i can give Lamhaa a 6/10, out of which 4 is for the movie, and an extra 2 for Rahul Dholakia's effort to make the movie.

Honestly, this is one of Dutt's best works in terms of script, execution and performance.

Dutt not only looks great but also gives a measured performance.

Rahul Dholakia's direction is first rate, as is his research. But their is also a nehative side to this. The problem is, because the director did such extensive research, he tries to cover too many topics in one film. This could have been avoided to make the film more pertinent and compact.

Besides, there are casting issues. Bipasha Basu is completely miscast. Either Kangana Ranaut or Preity Zinta would have been more convincing as Aziza (the female protagonist).

Kunal Kapoor's weak voice undermines his effort. Anupam Kher, Murali Sharma, Vipin Sharma and Yashpal Sharma are good in their respective roles.

The music by Mithoon is first rate, as are the technical aspects like cinematography, sound and background score.

Unfortunately few people saw Lamhaa. For an audience that loves, and is fed, masala movies this was probably a tad too serious topic to see, let alone understand. The makers were guilty of not promoting the movie well, or taking it to the festival circuit at the least to grab more eyeballs.

It's poor box office performance and consequence lack of adulation notwithstanding, Lamhaa will always remain one of Sanjay Dutt's best films.

P. S. Like he has done throughout his career Salman copied Dutt's look in Lamhaa for Ek Tha Tiger.

It starts with a few revealing text captions about the history of Kashmir since 1947. And then comes a provoking dialogue referring to the region as "God made Heaven, Man created Hell". The opening five minutes raise the expectation levels to a great extent. But then what is offered to the viewers till the end is nothing more than a usual conspiracy crime drama made in the background of burning Kashmir.

It seems that the director Rahul Dholkia, after getting his share of appreciation for "Parzania" made on Gujrat riots, simply decided to keep the flame burning by selecting his next project on Kashmir. His only motive of making LAMHAA appears to be as if he just wanted to remain in the news, sitting on another controversial topic in continuation of his previous famous venture. In a very funny way he uses a tag line for the movie saying "The Untold Story of Kashmir".Whereas in reality he has nothing new to expose or disclose about Kashmir other than what we already know. However the only fresh statement he has got to make is that Kashmir is like a company in which everyone is investing from all parts of the world and the issue has every single person involved in it right from the common man to the military and the politicians.

But if we talk about the movie experience altogether, it is a big disappointment coming from the director of "Parzania". LAMHAA is undoubtedly a below average product, which falters in almost all its departments except cinematography. More precisely it has no script as such, written on the relevant subject of Kashmir. The story only talks about a big conspiracy being planned by the militants and the process of avoiding it by some good characters. It neither has any intelligent interpretation of the issue nor has any emotional feel about the innocent people suffering in the present situation.

Besides this, post intermission, very unexpectedly you witness a few scenes highly inspired from the Oscar winner, "The Hurt Locker". The sequences showing a chain of land mines attached to a single wire and plantation of bombs in the stomach of small children are all taken from the famous English flick. Further the climax written around an attack on a leader making his public speech in the midst of a huge crowd also has its similarities with "Vantage Point". Frankly speaking, I wasn't expecting this kind of inspiring act from the talented director. The film which starts off as a mature take on the subject, ends up in an equally immature and amateurish style with a bizarre kind of execution of its final moments. And in the end, you just wake up from your frozen state of mind realizing that it has actually ended all of a sudden.

On the performance front, except Anupam Kher every other name in the entire starcast fails to make a mark. Sanjay Dutt who plays an unknown messiah of the valley, keeps visiting every suspicious venue in Kashmir in his designer outfits and sun-glasses. His performance has only got his style and nothing else. Bipasha Basu, though tries hard but still is not able to impress. The scene of her getting beaten up by the women crowd should have been the highlight of the film. But very strangely the director decides to hide her face in this scene which restricts Bipasha to leave any kind of emotional impact on the viewers. Kunal Kapoor who enters late into the movie, just remains another character of the script and doesn't rise above that. Mahesh Manjrekar and Yashpal Sharma are both wasted in their few scenes. In short only Anupam Kher is able to leave his mark in a fine getup of a Kashmiri leader.

Musically the score has some good and soothing numbers used in their shorter versions in the movie which can be enjoyable as pure love songs alone. But out of all the controversies and propaganda created, the only merit of this reality based flick remains its Cinematography. The camera movements are shaky in order to give it an authentic feel (also on the lines of "The Hurt Locker"). But after a long time the DOP shows us the breathtaking glimpses of the divine valley which were missing on the screen since many years.

In a nutshell, LAMHAA is not at all about the serious issue of KASHMIR. On the contrary it's just another usual below the average Bollywood crime drama which deliberately tries to cash on with its subject revolving around KASHMIR. So you can decide for yourself if you want to see it.