THE WARRIOR
by Asif Kapadia
Review (modified) by PETER BRADSHAW of The Guardian - which recounts much of
the action!
The Warrior, by debutant feature director Asif Kapadia, is an excellent way
to kick off the ImagineAsia festival. It is a boldly spacious and terrifically
confident piece of film-making, a movie which hits such an exhilarating stride
from the outset it is difficult to credit that this is Kapadia's first full-length
venture. It is a really ambitious film; the director's hunting big game, and
the sheer chutzpah in the way his picture is laid out reminded me of a description
of Orson Welles discussing Macbeth: he picked up the play the way a marksman
handled a rifle.
Irfan Khan plays Lafcadia, a warrior in India's remote past - a privileged,
but essentially bonded servant to an unscrupulous warlord who thinks nothing
of publicly beheading non-tribute-payers pour encourager les autres. While prosecuting
some horrific retaliatory pogrom against a late-paying village at his master's
behest, the warrior has a crisis of conscience, renounces the way of violence
and, taking his son with him, heads for the hills. But the warlord, unable to
tolerate this display of insubordination, sends Biswas (Aino Annuddin), another
warrior, out to bring back Lafcadia's head - or submit himself to a dishonourable
death.
There is a mighty breadth to the movie's conception, a shimmering beauty to
Roman Osin's cinematography and the location work, something calm and seductively
mysterious in the scenes and sequences that Kapadia conjures up, and also plenty
of old-fashioned storytelling gusto. One of the not-so-little miracles that
the director brings off is the sense of having conveyed an epic in just 86 minutes,
yet without ever having been in much of a hurry, either to whisk us through
his storyline's constituent elements, or to cram in a lot of dialogue. Somehow,
the movie is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
Lafcadia's relationship with his son is where the movie's enigma and its moral
centre is located. At the beginning we see him exasperated at the boy's lack
of aptitude for a martial career, and we expect the father-son bond to be the
axis on which the film is founded. Yet a terrible moment of violence separates
them, and a capricious fate instead sends him a street urchin as a companion
in his travels - an incorrigible thief and ne'er-do-well, who could not be more
unacceptable as a substitute son.
In one sense, this boy's presence defines the other's absence, and embodies
the older man's anguish and terrible loneliness. But in another he stands for
a certain pathos, a sense that the gods have sent him the urchin as a kind of
emblem of his own degradation, and that looking after this young thief is a
propitiatory labour offered up to an implacable fate. The workings of destiny
are emphasised by an encounter with an old, blind woman with second sight -
and it is a measure of Kapadia's conviction that he can get away with inventions
like these - who says that the urchin is a thief and the warrior has "blood
on his face".
The anguish and isolation in Lafcadia's heart is also projected out into the
landscape - and, again, Kapadia finds a breathtaking range of locations, apparently
shooting largely around Jaipur and Jaselmere in Rajasthan: desert, woodland,
mountain, all photographed with great charm and lucidity.
But the response to the giant reaches of these monumental images doesn't preclude
a miniature sense of The Warrior's internal drama. It is a film that already
has - a little self- consciously - some of the flavour and lineaments of a classic,
and the picture's look is arguably reminiscent of many masters of the old and
new west: Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa come to mind, and the note of moral
fable, or elemental male confrontation being played out in the desert or featureless
scrub suggest an homage to Lean or Ford.
If this imitative quality is a bit callow, then it is certainly literate - and
engaging. But the director arguably shows an uncertain craftsmanship in his
final act, after the ultimate showdown between Biswas and Lafcadia, which Kapadia
schedules well before the final credits. The impetus of the film undoubtedly
slows after that, but I admired the way that the rest of the action is allowed
to unspool gently, underscoring the suggestion that the outcome of this clash
of warriors is maybe not so very significant viewed against the vast backdrop
of nature - a conclusion to which The Warrior's original quietist gesture of
self-abnegation was in any case leading.
When so much of Anglophone commercial cinema is a patchwork of clichés,
and boilerplate genres in which the bolts and rivets are rusting off, this movie's
clarity and intelligence are refreshing, and there's also a sense that big spiritual
ideas can be tackled with unapologetic frankness. There is in some way a literary
reflex to the movie: a narrative technique bordering on the magic realism modish
in fiction about a decade ago, yet demonstrating an access to the mysterious
interior story of the protagonist. Asif Kapadia has scored a tremendous success
with this first movie, a substantial, satisfying drama in a telling visual idiom.
He is a talent to watch and his film demands to be seen.