Perspectives matter, especially in films. Take, for instance, how Germans are often shown in war movies: a group of totalitarians with starched shoulder-padded suits, happy to roll tanks over underprivileged towns. In yesteryear movies — with a focus on the Second World War — they often fail against the courageous and righteous men and women of the allied forces.

Shift the geography to India and flip the point of view: the British are shown in a bad light — a sarcastic and spiteful lot who speak broken Hindi and do not hesitate to kill anyone who tries to stand up to them.

Rangoon is about perspectives, particularly of those that control its characters. In the film, an actress smitten by her producer falls in love with her bodyguard — a young soldier — in a pre-Partition period of despair and struggle. Sounds classic, doesn’t it? It does, at least, to its director and co-writer Vishal Bhardwaj — a man of distinctive visual flair.

Rangoon has a lot of visual quirks. For example, an overhead shot of a staircase in Eros Cinema that looks like a whirlpool that swallowed a nation of Rajas, or the scene in the film’s climax on a bridge connecting India to Burma, framed as a spider’s web that has caught a character in a moment of personal conflict.

Despite having plausible structural features, Rangoon is a messy film

Bhardwaj directs Rangoon and it is his most ambitious film — it has a narrative that is ambitious, grand and fictitious. This hard mix makes a messy film, even if its structural features are spot-on.

In 1943, India’s war for freedom had a conflict of ideologies. A narrated newsreel tells us that Gandhi’s passive-aggressive stance of offering the other cheek to the enemy had taken its toll on Subhash Chandra Bose. Bose, in retaliation, creates the Indian National Army (INA) which allies itself with the Japanese. The war in the Indo-China region spikes because of which the INA needs funds to survive.

Cut to Julia (Kangana Ranaut), an early ‘talkies’ action heroine — a nod to silent film actress Nadia remembered by film historians as Hunter Wali. Julia, a gypsy by birth, was bought by Rustom Billimoria (Saif Ali Khan) for a thousand rupees when she was 14 years old. Rustom is a former silent-era actor, now producer, who lost a hand in a stunt gone bad (much like a James Bond villain, he sports a fake metallic hand covered with a black glove). He helps her hone her skills as an actress and she becomes his mistress — and an easy target for the snooty high-society women.

Rustom is a tough taskmaster. In one scene early in the film, he forces her to do a scene in which she is required to jump off a balcony. When she hesitates, he tells her that he will do it — even with his one hand. She obliges, and Bhardwaj, the film’s real taskmaster, makes sure that her ties of obligation to Rustom become apparent.

Julia cowers under Rustom’s shadow but loves him like the love a pet has for its owner — duty-bound and appreciative. Rustom’s commitment to her is complicated: he stands up for Julia in society and yet makes it clear that he owns her body and soul. She is a representation of his unattainable ambitions.

Saif Ali Khan masters Rustom’s passive-aggressive stance with the skill he reserves for Bhardwaj’s films [his last great performance was in Omkara where he aced Langra Tayagi’s character]. His Rustom is also a British sympathiser, who sides with David Harding (Richard McCabe) — a Maj-General showboating the worst qualities of a Bollywoodised-angraiz: a mocking, hamming villain straight out of the late ’80s cinema.

In the first hour of Rangoon, Bhardwaj lays down the peculiarities of his characters and the world they inhabit. Scenes, although relevant to the story, drag and their longwinded movement hurts Shahid Kapoor’s character (Jamadar Nawab Malik) when he makes his entry half-an-hour later. Soon, Malik and Julia find themselves lost in the Indo-Burma border on their way to a morale-raising performance tour for the British (the tour was a forced-request from Harding).

With Khan out of the picture, Kapoor’s overformal, detached perfor­mance hinders one’s appreciation for the film and makes his romance with Julia unconvincing. Ranaut is near-perfect as Julia — a conflicted woman fighting for love and her country. Her soul and that of the film, which rises to its potential in the final hour, is simple to understand but hard to appreciate.

Published in Dawn, ICON, March 12th, 2017