Shaan in Hum Aik Hain

Syed Noor began making 786 almost two years back. This film was completed earlier this year and the title was changed to Hum Aik Hain, as the Censor Board Members did not approve of 786.

Syed Noor has often claimed in recent months that this film is his effort for promoting sectarian harmony, unity and peace. He wants religious understanding among different sects of the society. Such a claim coming from a film director certainly was heartening. Film, after all, is a medium for mass consumption. Today with Cable TV, Video, CD and DVD, only a small segment is going to the cinemas but that segment is crucial part of the society: male, single, urban, lower-middle-class and largely illiterate. And when it comes to religious harmony and sectarian peace, this segment of the society needs the message – loud and clear.

True to his claim in letter and spirit, Hum Aik Hain begins with an Azan showing Badshahi Mosque and other parts of Lahore with rather badly photographed (and badly lit) clips. The titles end on Shan (Mustafa) who is the muezzin. He is educated, wears jeans and is looking for a job. But the job does not come even after repeated appointments. The academic degrees are not even worth good enough to be sold as waste paper. Trash must go to trash and the degrees are burnt alive in a rage of disappointment and frustration. There seems to be plenty of fire around at nights around Lahore with flames burning inside large empty drums (read ‘a heavy symbolism of hero’s agony’).

And yes, Shan has an ultra-religious mother Naghma who looks like a nun in white She helps children with Quran lessons and baptizes babies by marking 786 on their foreheads (it is supposed to me good omen). Naghma was never a good actress and now her haggard looks and somewhat forced Urdu accent, does not make things any easier for her and the audiences. Coming back to fire in the streets, Shan watches a Maulana being gunned down in cold blood. He is a witness and must suffer at the hands of the police and the establishment.

Shan later joins Nisar Qadri’s gang, delivering bags (containing bombs) from one place of the town to other and is instrumental in inadvertently killing his mother who happens to be traveling in one such bus to be blown up on Nisar Qadri’s command. Incidentally Shan is strictly not allowed to see inside the bag and find out what deadly explosives he has been carrying and delivering. Now it is time for Shan to change his loyalties and he does that pretty fast.

He builds up a gang of his own the members of which wear red bandanas with 786 emblazoned on them. The villains must be paid in their own currency and the scores are settled on the occasion of Ashura when crowds are purifying their sins from events of Karbala. A van carrying explosives by Haider Sultan is averted minutes before but blood baths are choreographed simultaneously in the nearby deserted streets. The man behind these deadly schemes, Nisar Qadri, is actually butchered in his decorative temple, right across the street from Badshahi Mosque – now you know the significance of terrorists hitting religious monuments. In fact, Nisar Qadri’s neat little temple with badly sculptures statues is shown numerous times with minaret of Badshahi Mosque visible right across the frame. One could call that pretentious framing and composition.

Hum Aik Hain also takes on many other sub-plots. Shamyl Khan is a diehard young man from the Shiite community and a friend of Shan’s. Together they must go through the physical torture but must fight the evil and make this world a better place to live (and die). And then there are drugs and junkies suddenly make an appearance. If that is not enough, Shan must also go through the exotic experience and feel the ecstasy. Hum Aik Hain in spite of cheap and low-grade comic relief by a bhands and mirasis is dry film. Saima and new face Gull (Rozina’s daughter) appear in extended extra roles and their brief appearance does not have anything to do with the story.

Shan works remarkably well. He was made for this character, which he has been playing in abundance since 1995 so successfully and shamelessly. Shamyl Khan appears in a brief yet strong role with a little bit of romance and a couple of songs. He is a man with strong convictions but he is torn between his conviction, friendship to Sunni friend Shan and the murder of the Maulana in the Imam Bara. Gul is a rich lady who donates generously to Imam Baras and meets Shamyl Khan and falls for him instantly (this is where we must suspend our disbelief). Saima is a mirasan who meets Shan in the hospital. She looks good and we can watch her in almost over a dozen wardrobes in just a single song. The song in question is apparently supposed to add to the production effects of the film but with a flat, one-dimensional set, it just doesn’t.

In a world where you are watching the best and the latest from both Hollywood and Bollywood right in your living room, filmmakers have to be intelligent and visually alert to make films with substance, meaning, powerful characters and slick production, all the while remaining within a modest budget. And then you have to know what kind of a film you are making. In Hum Aik Hain, Syed Noor should not have mixed religion with drugs, seductive dances, musical melodrama in the hospitals and love spots. There are more sober ways and means of providing relief other than introducing superfluous characters and ludicrous situations. Technically, Ali Jan as cameraman and Z.A. Zulfi as editor have done well but the film’s length could have been reduced to give a fast pace to the lingering scene after scene. M. Arshad as composer has ripped off many tunes. One song filmed on Shamyl and Gul is straight out of Bandish (1980) which was a beautiful composition by Robin Ghosh, rendered then by Mehdi Hasan and Mehnaz.

Syed Noor here is almost remaking his earlier film Angarey, a totally plagiarized version of an Indian film. In Angarey, Shan is a lawyer who must fight the villains and eventually hang the culprit. True, he has brought in Sunni-Shia element, but he has shown his bias by showing Hindus as the real culprits behind the sectarian split in our society. Noor goes on to the extent of involving RAW in the plot, which he shows in reverse as WAR and makes sure than Shan comes out with this explanation loud and clear. The claim that India has had its share of anti-Pakistani films does not hold true at all.

Films like Moosa Khan and now Hum Aik Hain are not showing Indians but Hindus as sources of all evil. Indian filmmakers have never done that. They may have had their share of Border, Khakee, Refugee, Maa Tujhey Salaam, LoC: Kargil and Sarfarosh, but while these films can be anti-Pakistan, they are never anti-Muslim. The Muslim characters may be cardboard figures but they are never really shown in a hideously negative role. Syed Noor as a writer and director must realize that the film medium is not there to degrade minorities and involve them in hateful crimes. That itself is religious bigotry, something Syed Noor is supposed to be fighting against – Aijaz Gul

Cast and Production Credits

Year - 2004, Genre – Drama, Country - Pakistan, Language - Urdu, Producer - N/A, Director - Syed Noor, Music Director – M. Arshad, Cast – Shaan, Shamyl Khan, Saima, Haider Sultan, and Introducing Gul (Rozina’s Daughter)

    That the director of Buddha Gujjar hardly innovates is apparent even from the name of the movie. The suffix Gujjar has appeared in about half a dozen movies released during the last 12 months, though only a couple of them have been commercially successful. This is reminiscent of Jatt phenomenon led by Maula Jatt, though Syed Kamal can be given the credit of using the word prior to its release not in one but a series of flicks like Jatt Kurian Toun Darda and Jatt Kamala Gaya Dubai. Filmmakers, inspired by Maula Jatt’s phenomenal success thought the secret lay in the name alone and, therefore, they continued using it until it ran out of steam to be able to ensure box-office viability for loose plots and even looser productions. In Gujjar’s case, the word is yet to run its complete course and Buddha Gujjar is fortunate enough to have used it when it is a bit of a novelty.

    The name of any movie in Pakistan is determined in three ways; by taking a cue from Indian cinema, by plagiarizing on popular TV plays, or, most importantly, by showing in no subtle way as to who has financed the project. When wrestlers from Gujranwala and Lahore’s Walled City are the producers, the names inevitably are Achha Shookarwala, Puttar Shahiyay Da etc; when student leaders are the financiers, films blatantly tout their names as a symbol of success in life and when the money comes from Gujjars like Haji Chaudhry Fakir Muhammad, the films produced are called Humayoon Gujjar, Jeeva Gujjar, Kala Gujjar and of course, Buddha Gujjar. Of late, Arains have taken the cue and expect a spate of movies with titles like Arain Da Kharak to hit the box office in coming months.

    So much for the name, perhaps. In fact, the movie’s importance in Syed Noor’s career lies not in the title but in the subject matter. Among the most successful directors today, he has completed a full circle to reach where he once was as a filmi writer – treading the beaten track as hardly as one could – though his first film as a writer, Society Girl, was no mean achievement.

    Following in the footsteps of film writers of late 1970s and early 1980s who would bank upon unrestrained violence to achieve success, he used to churn out stuff that can easily be labeled as run of the mill. The departure came with his directorial debut in Kasam. His Ghoonghat and Sangam were a breath of fresh air for a cinema splashed all over with bloody, violent colors. From then on he continued experimenting between flicks based on socio-familial and personal themes and in at least one case, tried to put violence in a context by producing Hawain, a movie based on the life of a student leader. In Buddha Gujjar, it seems, unrestrained violence has staged a comeback as far as Syed Noor’s artistic experience is concerned.

    Violence, however, is one thing people no longer bother about in a Lollywood movie. But the bad thing about violence in Buddha Gujjar is the fact that in most part of the movie it appears to be violence for the sake of it. The forces of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are there and they fight many a pitched battle but there emerges during the process someone who believes wholeheartedly in sheer killer instinct to make a name for himself. Fortunately, he is not the protagonist but the hard-skinned, obdurate son of the main character Buddha, a God-fearing, no nonsense, magnanimous Gujjar who till the end believes violence only breeds more violence, though he also believes in avenging himself of any wrong done against him without any help from the enforcers of law.

    Sharif – the son, nicknamed Jagga and played by Shaan, is finally killed in a police encounter but not before killing scores if not hundreds of policemen single-handedly. An ending like this may be an attempt by the director to show that violence without cause always ends in the blind alley of death. Also the fact that Buddha, played by Yousaf Khan, survives after finishing off all his enemies is symbolic of the victory of ‘good’ against ‘evil’.

    Not that the theme is the only stock thing about the movie. Stock scenes, stock situations and stock characters are conspicuous by their sheer and sometimes offensive presence. The skimpily dressed dancer swaying her body amid a crowd of fans, the drunkard, scheming, selfish villain deserting even the closest friend, the local Robin Hood magnanimously doling out loot to the poor and the self-sacrificing plebeians trying to protect their upper class benefactors all have a place, in most cases a prominent one, in Buddha Gujjar as they have had in countless other movies. The court, the courtesan’s salon, the police station and the hospital are also there as they have been in almost all movies since they first appeared on the filmi scene. The most ludicrous thing about the last place is not the amount of violence that takes place there but the ‘instant’ and ‘instinctive’ way in which blood transfusion takes place. The stock situations, inter alia, include a fight over attempts to monopolize the emotions of a courtesan and the defection of someone from the villain’s inner circle of confidantes.

    The saving grace of the movie is its realistic setting and an attempt to keep the wardrobe as wearable as possible, obviously with a couple of exceptions for lead female characters played by Saima and Resham. The music and the lyrics too are apt and evocative, though not memorable.

    The acting mostly is acceptable, if not good. But one man who stands head and shoulders above the rest of the cast as far as acting is concerned is Yousaf Khan. In fact, the role of an ageing but graceful man comes to him quite naturally. He does not need to act, rather he opts to under-act here and there. But even this suits him and the character. Shaan strives hard to play the spoilt guy but his attempt to always face the camera with eyes turned upwards sometimes irritates. Nawaz Khan and Arshad Mehmood do well.

    Turning back to the ‘formula’ thing. Once Sultan Rahi and Anjuman were the ‘formula’ couple of Punjabi movies. Now that they are out of the picture, Syed Noors of Pakistani tinsel town have been trying all along to find others who can fit the bill. This will hardly take the local cinema forward. But the Shaans and the Saimas, it seems, have started to adjust themselves to the directors’ design, by playing the same old ball in a not so new way – Aijaz Gul

Cast and Production Credits

Year – 2002, Genre – Drama, Country – Pakistan, Language – Punjabi, Producer – N/A, Director – Syed Noor, Music Director – N/A, Cast – Shaan, Nawaz Khan, Saima, Resham, Arshad Mehmood, Yousaf Khan