THE ICON REVIEW: ASSAULT IN PROGRESS
A film’s opening image tells you almost everything you need to know about the content. Purist filmmakers (the kind that stick like superglue to narrative form), or those shrewd enough are bound by habit to ground the film’s tone into the audience from the first frame — let alone a shot. Often, the opening image is reflected by a closing image, which culminates a character’s or a narrative’s journey. Classic examples include Citizen Kane and Gone Girl.
In director Hassan Waqas Rana’s Yalghaar, the opening image comes before the film in a boldly written citation — a tenacious dedication to ISPR and the Armed Forces of Pakistan. The tone, and one’s expectation, is fixed in stone like the Excalibur at this point. His closing image does not culminate the film’s narrative, it instead salutes the heroes of the country … again.
Rana, like every Pakistani filmmaker, would not want his filmmaking skills compared to international directors — this is his debut film as a director, and second as a producer and screenwriter after Waar. He shouldn’t be worried. The propagandist nature of the citation, epilogue and the content, especially in war movies, is also a norm in Hollywood.
Yalghaar claims to be the most expensive film ever made in Pakistan. Unfortunately it doesn’t show on screen
Rana, though, tries to make Yalghaar the best three-hour ‘join the army’ commercial possible. Like Waar, Yalghaar starts on an intense sprint. The camera, anxious and aware of a looming emergency, opens on an army operation in progress. Zipping through locations and following actors, we tag behind them like a nervous secretary. A satellite image locks in on a silent, remote location of broken bricks and 100-watt Tungsten bulbs.