Everyone, says someone important in this searing document of our times, is playing politics in the Kashmir Valley. In a milieu of all-pervasive politics, thank the Lord for a creative voice that can look into the burning Valley with dispassionate compassion.
Lamhaa is one of those docu-dramas that could have easily toppled into the territory of over-statement and over-simplified politics. And boy, haven't we seen that happen in very successful political cinema in recent times?! Rahul Dholakia who earlier made the gently persuasive Parzania on the aftermath of the Gujarat riots, doesn't lose his storytelling equilibrium even when the sitiuations of crises described by the skilfully-written plot scream for attention.
Restraint and honesty go hand-in-hand in Dholakia's Kashmir, which we'd like to believe, is the real Kashmir, unalloyed, non-magnified, intense and utterly devoid of artifice.
The camera moves restlessly through the dangerous crowded main roads and tense bylanes of Kashmir where anything can happen.
The cinematographer James Fowlds seems to know the Valley of the damned with the transparent scrupulousness of an insider who can place himself outside the explosive bustle of a portion of earth that's rapidly slipped into the stratosphere of anarchy and mayhem.
The high-octane screenplay has no space or time to shed tears for the innocent and the dead. Miraculously liberated of overt sentimentality Lamhaa moves with candour and confidence through a world whose politics has become progressively impossible for the outsider to comprehend. Dholakia's narrative moves through a labyrinth of pain and violence without trying to make common sense of them.
Lamhaa is not an easy film to watch. It comes to no decisive end. It takes into consideration the entire politics of Kashmir without careening towards excessive drama.This is that rare political drama where every component in the jigsaw of politics and terrorism is put on screen with a sensitivity and precision that repudiate melodramatic excesses.
A word of special praise for Mithoon's songs. The lyrically lush tunes break into the deafening sound of bomb blasts and roaring guns to remind us that once the best poets of Kashmir wrote poetry on the beauty of the Valley.
