Saved by the screen

In Nitin Kakkar's Filmistaan, which has recently developed a word-of-mouth following, there are many familiar platitudes about Indians and Pakistanis being essentially one people with a shared culture, a shared passion for cricket - and for Hindi cinema, which ordinary people in Pakistan watch with enthusiasm even as religious leaders and militants warn them against its corrupting effects. When Sunny (Sharib Hashmi), an aspiring actor turned assistant director and an incorrigible movie buff, is kidnapped by terrorists near the border (they were after the Americans in the film crew) and awakens to learn he is in the Pakistani wilderness, he can't tell the difference - everything looks the same, people speak the same language. In a moving scene that follows shortly after, he hears a folk song sung to the tune of the Hindi-film song "Yaara Seeli Seeli" and joins in by warbling the lyrics as he knows them - it brings him comfort, as do the nighttime DVD screenings of films such as Maine Pyaar Kiya.

At first you might feel ambivalent about Sunny: as movie dialogues trip off his tongue in almost any given situation, he can go from being likeably funny to exasperating in the space of a few seconds. But by the time he has made friends with a young Pakistani named Aftab - a fellow film buff who wears colourful, flowery scarves, illegally peddles "seedi-yan" and decides to help Sunny escape his captors - the viewer's sympathies are fixed.

And how can they not be? After all, we are in a hall ourselves, watching a film. And set against these two kindred spirits are the terrorists, who are suspicious - or outright contemptuous - of movies. Using guns to terrify people is part of their way of life, but the other kind of shooting is an idea only the devil could have thought up, and so the camera is a "manhoos cheez" for them.

Filmistaan is a little too pat and feel-good in places. Characters show unexpected self-awareness in spelling out their own predicaments (as in a dialogue involving a man who grew up in a madrassa and was made to do azaan five times a day without fail but wasn't assured of two meals); there are stereotypes such as the grinning do-gooder, the hardened older militant and the more introspective younger one. But perhaps the way to look at this film is to see it in terms of wish-fulfilment rather than as a hard-edged depiction of the realities of the India-Pakistan situation. And in this view, perhaps the cards are stacked against the terrorists, not because they are the bad guys but because they lack the power of imagination that Sunny and Aftab have.

Imprisoned in a room, like a movie star in a screen, Sunny acts out scenes for the children outside - he is upbeat despite knowing he may only have a few days left to live. But perhaps this is because he knows he is in a film himself and that he will be rescued by the magic of cinema; perhaps the universe will conspire to help him. And indeed, something amusingly ironic happens in the climax: a character who is not at all interested in cinema - the older terrorist - does something filmi, in the style of the James Bond villain stopping to talk instead of quickly eliminating his quarries, and this buys some time for the good guys.

Soon after, it seems like Sunny and Aftab will be separated through the Sholay Trope: Jai sends his buddy Veeru off to safety and sacrifices his own life. But that doesn't happen, and no matter, for there are so many other cinematic possibilities available. The actual ending of Filmistaan reminded me of the freeze-frame that closes Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a scene that suggested cinema's ability to keep hope alive - or, even if there is no hope, to spare us from seeing bad things happen to the characters we like. (Butch and Sundance are about to be gunned down by the law enforcers when the scene freezes and the titles roll.) Whether Sunny and Aftab are alive or not at the end is much too literal a question, almost beside the point. What matters is that this Indian and this Pakistani have made it together, hand in hand, to some mythical place where barbed wire doesn't exist, where they can watch CDs of the movies they love and perhaps even make a few themselves. Meanwhile, in the "real world" beyond their ken, life continues in a more complicated, less hopeful way.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer