Cast: John Abraham, Diana Penty
Director: Abhishek Sharma
Rating: 1.5 stars (out of five)
But no matter how hard the makers try to fuse dubious intent with ill-considered execution, Parmanu is a damp squib of colossal dimensions. It never explodes to life. While claiming "based on a true event" status and liberally incorporating footage of Bill Clinton, Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and, above all, Atal Bihari Vajpayee speaking on camera, the screenplay throws a whole lot of fictional elements into a messy pot. This results in a film that is caught in cross-signals so dreary and humdrum that even rocket science would seem exhilarating in comparison.
The Parmanu script, which unabashedly attributes the success of India's nuclear programme to one prime minister and his chief scientific adviser, serves a deliberate, blatantly lopsided, please-the-current-powers-that-be purpose. It suggests that nobody in India had ever thought of tapping nuclear power as a means to ensuring both security and peace for the nation. That obviously is an overt falsehood aimed at erasing the names of Jawaharlal Nehru, Homi Bhabha, Indira Gandhi, Vikram Sarabhai, Raja Ramanna and others from the roll of honour, if we are willing to associate honour and humanity with any policy that rides solely on brazen bellicosity.
Early on in the film, this lionized government functionary, Ashwat Raina (John Abraham), son of a gallantry award-winning army officer, grandly pipes up at a stuffy official meeting: "It is time for India to become a nuclear state." His earnestness takes our breath away, but his boss, a sceptical minister, looks askance at his suggestion and even ridicules him.
The floppy disc that Raina hands over to one of the officers in the room is quickly reduced to a coaster on the table. But the politician, who has a direct line to the Prime Minister, seeks to hog the credit for the nuclear test plan. When the project backfires - this is in 1995 - he instantly washes his hands of the aborted test. Ashwat Raina is scapegoated and handed an "immediate termination" order.
A song blares on the soundtrack - Parmanu eschews many of the conventions of commercial Hindi cinema but cannot resist bunging in mood-highlighting musical numbers - to point to the wronged man's state of mind as he is banished to Mussoorie. There, he coaches aspiring civil service officers while his astrophysicist-wife Sushma (Anuja Sathe) shoulders the responsibility of raising their nine-year-old son.
Raina's mission is what Parmanu - The Story of Pokhran is all about, but at no point does the film manage to capture the urgency of the operation, which entails dodging detection by US spy satellites, destructive sandstorms and bouts of self-doubt. The six operatives look like a bunch of eager-beavers playing hide and seek in the desert heat. Indeed, Parmanu is never more engaging than that.
Raina wants to do something for the country. His wife says to him: "Hero vardi se nahi iraadon se bante hain (It isn't the uniform that make a hero, it is his resolve)." The man takes that exhortation to heart. His subsequent foray into the unknown resembles a boring stroll in the park that is occasionally interrupted by a marital misunderstanding and interventions by two spies working for the CIA and ISI in the area.
In one scene, the hero blames his flat foot for his failure to break into the army. He could well have been speaking about the film as a whole. Parmanu - The Story of Pokhran is as a flat as a pancake, a hopelessly limp exercise with creaky nucleus that is buried under a mound of forced tropes before it can get going.
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