Dhokha ka mat....

Of the three movies released on 31 August, Dhoka is the movie having the new genre and new subject in it. The movie is much realistic and well contemplated. The subject is thought provoking and Pooja has, this time, done very well. The movie is presented by Mahesh Bhatt, produced by Mukesh Bhatt and directed by Pooja Bhatt.
Zaid Ahmed Khan (Muzammil) is a policeman in the Mumbai police force, who suddenly finds that his wife Sara (Tulip) has been accused of being a suicide bomber, while she simultaneously goes missing. Zaid tries to uncover the truth and meets several people enroute a senior cop Mehra (Gulshan Grover), Sara's grandfather (Anupam Kher) and even the head of a terrorist organisation (Munish Makhija), before realising the big truth. Mehra, who is heading the anti-terrorist squad, even has Zaid suspended from his work because he suspects him to have links with his wife and the terrorist organisation as well. Zaid, who is also despatched to the cooler earlier under suspicion, is then let off because intelligence reports clear him. Zaid now sets off to find the truthHe goes off to the place Sara had set left for and realizies that she was with her grandfather in Nasik. Then he comes to know about her past and how she was a victim of ridicule and rape by the police and how it led to her being a terrorist and how her brother Danish too was affected. Then he moves on to meet the head of the terrorist organization who is inciting many such people to turn into suicide bombers. And before he knows it he has a big task on his hands - defusing a plan to blow up Mumbai's leading railway station. Pooja Bhatt excels as a director. Her vision as a filmmaker seems to have grown. But she needs to strengthen her script a lot more. Words normally not used in common parlance by commoners seem to seep easily into the film. A scene where a cop says main tafteesh kar raha hun is out of the 70s. People don't use such words these days, Pooja. But films, these days seem to talk a lot about the trauma of the Indian Muslim. Peek back into Chak De and look at Kabir Khan being the losing captain of the Indian hockey team in a match against Pakistan. Ditto with Zaid when he turns out to be a cop from the minority at a hospital where victims from the majority community are being brought in, in a blast purportedly enigineered by a Muslim suicide bomber. Questions about the accountability and the responsibilities of the Indian Muslim are brought forth - stories that we have been hearing time and again in movies made on these subjects right after the 1993 Bombay Bomb Blasts. The socio-econonomic and socio-cultural nature of the film does make it stand apart from the rest of the films of this genre. One just wishes that Pooja had made the film a little more hard hitting. Nevertheless, the film does not look like a film usually out from the Bhatt camp. Watch out for a scene involving a cop Ashutosh Rana, Tulip Joshi, and an MMS wish this scene had been stronger - the film should have been yards ahead.
Suffused with a sense of imminent catastrophe and an aura of implosive tension applied to the explosive theme, "Dhokha" is a film that persuades you not-so-gently to think about the quality of lives that we live and a social order that thinks terrorism happens only to 'them'.
Really, one hasn't had a more jolting reality-check in a while.
The cast of the movie includes Muzammil Ibrahim as Zaid Ahmed, Tulip Joshi as Sarah, Anupam Kher, Gulshan Grover, Ashutosh Rana, Anupam Shyam, Vineet Kumar, Aushima Sawhney as Nandini. The story of the movie has been written by Mahesh Bhatt.