Terrorists in suburbia in ‘Kurbaan’ - Movie Review
Published: November 24, 2009
By JENNIFER HOPFINGER
Starring Saif Ali Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Vivek Oberoi
Comparisons of Kurbaan and New York—another recent Bollywood film about terrorism in the U.S.—are inevitable. Both are suspenseful stories about South Asians living in the idyllic American suburbs and who are involved, to varying degrees, in urban terrorist attacks. But while New York has a message, Kurbaan does not—nor does it mean to. It’s simply an edge-of-your-seat thriller, and an excellent one at that.
The ominous song during the opening credits is the first clue that the sweet courtship between two college professors in Delhi is headed for trouble. The smooth—and slightly smarmy—Ehsaan (Saif Ali Khan) sweeps his attractive colleague Avantika (Kareena Kapoor) off her feet. Khan and Kapoor are a couple off-screen as well, which is no guarantee of on-screen chemistry, but their attraction is palpable in every frame—a good thing since their characters aren’t very interesting otherwise. (The film is fairly risqué by Bollywood standards.)
Their religious differences—he’s Muslim, she’s not—aren’t a big deal, and they get married and move to the U.S. The newlyweds buy a house in a predominantly Indian suburb in New York, and Ehsaan’s not wild about his new neighbors, who are conservative Muslims, or their eerily quiet, gender-segregated social gatherings. The career-minded and Western-dressing Avantika doesn’t fit in with the veiled homemakers on the block, but she does her best to be friendly. Before long, the woman across the street cryptically confides to Avantika that she’s in trouble and asks her to contact a friend, a reporter named Rihana (Dia Mirza), for help. Avantika does some snooping on her own and discovers that the subdivision is harboring terrorists, who are going to blow up a plane.
Rihana is on the doomed flight and her fiancé Riyaaz (Vivek Oberoi), who has recently returned from reporting in Iraq, decides to find her killers without the help of authorities. His reasons for going it alone are implied—he’s a cocky journalist, maybe a little unhinged from witnessing war, maybe a little conflicted about his identity as an American Muslim—but the motivations for his foolhardy behavior aren’t sufficiently explored. However, Oberoi’s intensity gives his character emotional depth that’s missing in the writing, and given that Avantika is merely a hapless victim, Riyaaz is the real hero of the story. Oberoi’s role wasn’t emphasized in the promotion of the film, but his intriguing, reckless Riyaaz looms large in the movie, overshadowing the two leads.
The terrorists are two-dimensional, which effectively heightens their scariness. The marvelous actor Om Puri plays the leader of the terrorist cell, and actress Kirron Kher plays his wife, a matriarch who is consummate evil—a unique opportunity for Kher, who, like most Indian actresses of a certain age, is usually relegated to playing paragons of maternal love. But the frightening stock villains come uncomfortably close to exploiting paranoia, making it seem as if terrorist bogeymen are plotting around every corner, even in suburbia. By avoiding a message, Kurbaan may be unintentionally sending another one.
Kurbaan is rated Worth Watching.
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