The name ‘Wagah’ immediately invokes the Wagah border ceremony, or, as Michael Palin calls it, an event of ‘carefully choreographed contempt’. Every day, two hours before sunset, an elaborate flag ceremony is conducted by the Indian Border Security Force (BSF) and the Pakistan Rangers (PR). Director GNR Kumaravelan, who created a lasting impression with Haridas, is back with Wagah, starring Vikram Prabhu and model turned actress Ranya Rao.
Wagah’s trailer released on Diwali, and depicts Vikram Prabhu as an army jawan. The opening sequence uses a series of high-activity riot scenes interspersed with silence and darkness. Like a dying person’s intermittent consciousness, the camera takes us in and out of frenzied activity and absolute nothingness. Mobs run towards the camera with blazing torches, a teary-eyed old man tries to escape a hostile armed crowd with a young boy in his arms. A stone shatters a glass pane. Imman’s background score here is like an ambulance wailing. Scene by scene, chaos is built. The tempo increases as a bus is set alight. And the editing is like the firing of a machine gun.
Cut to an army van, soothing music, and four shadowy figures; soldiers driving up the mountain roads. Enter Vikram Prabhu. He stands on a high platform overlooking the border, with the cold sun on his face. There’s space, massive mountains, clouds, a river. And the hero sips on his morning tea. The voiceover tells us about how lonely it is. Enter heroine, who smiles, whose hair blows in the mind. She then obligingly shakes her hair in case it hadn’t been blowing enough. In between, Vikram Prabhu’s eyes and nose can be seen. Watching her. As if that wasn’t creepy enough, we then get a glimpse of the mandatory custodial torture scenes every war movie has to have.
The music becomes fun. Vikram Prabhu does some heroine rescuing, dances with his fellow officers, search operations are carried out, and then a voiceover consoles us: “Our journey doesn’t usually go the way we plan. But such journeys only teach us what life is all about.”