Another Friday, another propaganda film. With Kangana Ranaut in the lead, Tejas is what it was expected to be: a movie which tries to mask its technical flaws behind the tricolour. What was shocking is how vile it became in its bid to distract audiences from its shoddy filmmaking. I have to give in to an aeronautical metaphor. Every subsequent scene descends the film deeper and deeper into blatant jingoism, so much so that it eventually crashes into a garbled mess of mediocrity.
Cast: Kangana Ranaut, Ashish Vidyarthi, Varun Mitra and Anshul Chauhan
Director: Sarvesh Mewara
When we first meet Tejas Gill (Kangana Ranaut), she is running towards a helicopter in slow motion, as if posing for a photo-op. Little do we know that most minutes of the film will be wasted in capturing Kangana either darting determinedly towards an aircraft or exiting majestically from one. Anyway, Tejas gets aboard the scrappily VFX-ed chopper and ultimately rescues a fellow IAF officer from an island inhabited by endangered tribes. The sequence is so choppily edited, it's jarring. You never know at what point Tejas dangle from a wire and jump off the helicopter onto the island. She might as well have apparated there. She gets three arrows in the back after managing to outrun the tribals while carrying a fully grown man on her shoulders. It was supposed to be a sentimental, sacrificial moment, but all I could hear was muffled giggling in the theatre.
Tejas’s being is unfolded for us in randomly squeezed in flashbacks. We see her as a trainee officer, overtly eager to man her first airplane. During her primary sortie, as she is sitting in a biplane on the runway, her instructor asks her: “What do you see ahead, Tejas?” And since, just before, she was lovingly inspecting a fighter jet, you expect the answer to be related to the freedom of flying or the vastness of the skies. But what you get is a bland, nationalistic response: “I can see the route to serve my country, sir!”
The central plot of the film comes when we have had enough already. An engineer, actually an Indian spy, has been captured and is being tortured by terrorists from the ‘Lashkar-e-pak’, a silly play on Lashkar-e-Taiba (Fun fact: Lashkar means Army, so the term in a way means Pakistan’s military. I don’t think there was any effort on being subtle). Now, it is up to Tejas to fly our homegrown fighter jet Tejas into Pakistani territory and rescue our man. More than planes, tired patriotic dialogues fly around: “Hum udte udte jayenge, desh ke kaam aayenge (We will fly there for our nation)” or the Uri callback: “Ye naya Hindustan hain, ye ghar mein khusega bhi aur maarega bhi (This is new India, it will enter the enemy territory and kill them).”
All arguments in favour of Kangana being a fine actor, distracted by her ideology disintegrate with Tejas. The National Award winner is so overtly determined in her performance that she ultimately appears stony. She robotically shifts between emotions and only seems convincing while slashing the throat of a terrorist. The radicals, on the other hand, seem like Charlie Hebdo caricatures have come to life. Their head, the mastermind, is named Khatuni (Khomeini?), whose morning probably doesn’t start without the words ‘tabahi (destruction)’ and ‘manzar (witness)’.
It's all harmless fun and green-screened dogfights before Tejas unveils its true colours. Suicide bombers are going to strike in a certain Janmabhoomi at a certain temple. A priest is shot in the head before his corpse being gunned again, purely for cheap provocation. The soldiers ultimately save the day. Outside the temple, a sea of saffron erupts in chants of ‘Jai Shree Ram’. A news channel flashes: ‘New India’. Indeed.
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