Maoist shadow over IFFI

Maoists are set to cast a shadow on the 40th International Film Festival of India.

Red Alert-The War Within, a Hindi film that travels into the Naxalite heartland of Andhra Pradesh, will premiere on Saturday evening in the presence of its director, Ananth Mahadevan, and its lead actors Suniel Shetty and Sameera Reddy.

Red Alert, theatre and screen actor Mahadevan’s eighth film as director, is a world apart from run-of-the-mill Bollywood. It captures the gritty, the grimy and the gory with unwavering focus, taking Indian political cinema a step forward towards acquiring mainstream currency.

Red Alert is riveting fare. It journeys into the Maoist-infested jungles of Andhra Pradesh to craft a searing portrait of a Naxalite dalam in action. The filmmakes no concessions to Bollywood conventions - it has no glamour, no songs, and no crowd-pleasing diversions. What it does have in abundance is frisson and energy. It adopts an edgy style that is perfectly in keeping with the bleak, benighted setting of the drama.

"I was clear from the very outset that Red Alert would have to be brutally uncompromising. I did not want any melodrama or scenes of high emotion in the film. There was no room for all that in this setting," says Mahadevan.

Co-scripted by him and writer-director Aruna Raje, this ’real’ tale of a poverty-stricken farm labourer, the director says, is not so much about Maoism as about one man’s moral and physical struggle to give himself and his children a better life.

This struggle pits the man, Narasimha, against his own conscience and the vicious environment that he lives in. He is sucked into the world of the Maoists - he hopes to make enough money by working for them to educate his children - but he ends up antagonising them. So he is fan on the run from himself, his erstwhile associates and the law.

Red Alert is unlike anything that theatre, television and film veteran Mahadevan has done before. His big-screen directorial debut was 2002’s retro musical, Dil Vil Pyaar Vyaar. He followed it up with commercially oriented films like Dil Maange More, Aksar and Aggar.

Besides Suniel Shetty, who plays Narasimha with just the right mix of vulnerability and virility, Red Alert has an array of fine actors in the cast - Vinod Khanna, Ashish Vidyarthy, Seema Biswas, Ayesha Dharkar, Makarand Deshpande and Naseeruddin Shah.

"It was a tad difficult for some of the actors to reconcile themselves to the tone and approach of the film. But once they got the hang of things, they gave their roles everything they had," says Mahadevan.

Red Alert, which won a critics’ award at the Stuttgart ’Bollywood and Beyond’ Film Festival earlier this year, fetched lead actor Suniel Shetty a prize for best acting at the recent South Asian International Film Festival (SAIFF) in New York. Says the Bollywood star: "I have been in the film industry for nearly 20 years but I’ve never won any acting award. And now I have an international award in my kitty."

"I’m so happy for Suniel," says Mahadevan. "He really got into the skin of Narasimha." The screen character emerged from a newspaper report that the director had read a year or so ago about a man on the run from both the police and his one-time comrades, the Maoists.

"Red Alert isn’t so much about the problem of Maoism as it is about one man cornered by a system that he can barely comprehend," explains Mahadevan. "In essence, the human drama is universal despite the fact that it addresses a burning Indian issue. All rebellions begin with a just cause and then distortions creep in and violence takes over."

Shetty, on his part, has reason to be delighted at how the film has shaped up. "The discussions that we had prior to and during the shoot really helped me grasp the essence of the character," says the actor who has built his career predominantly around action films and comedies. "The last offbeat film I did was Gulzar’s Hu Tu Tu. That was another high point."

Shetty feels that having a woman as a screenwriter was a big advantage. "The humanist perspective and the strong female characters set Red Alert apart… What the film says in no uncertain terms is that violence can never be a solution."