Did Dil Se teach these people nothing?

Kurbaan (2009) opens with Avantika (Kareena Kapoor), a psychology professor from New York who’s currently teaching in India, meeting Ehsaan (Saif Ali Khan), the new guy at her college. Ehsaan is immediately smitten, but Avantika doesn’t want to get involved. Still, he’s charming, very very persistent, and played by Saif Ali Khan, so the couple are soon canoodling over coffee, and when Avantika is called back to New York, Ehsaan offers to follow her, as her husband. She accepts.
The happy couple find a house in an Indian neighborhood about an hour form the university. The neighbors are all fairly orthodox Muslims, but very friendly, with Bhaisaab (Om Puri) and his wife Aapa (Kiron Kher, who is clearly enjoying the chance to play something other than the hero’s long-suffering mother for once) acting as community leaders.

Avantika realizes something is not right when one of the neighborhood wives asks her to take a message to a reporter (Diya Mirza). Ehsaan advises her not to get involved, but when her neighbor disappears, Avantika investigates and learns that a) her neighbor is dead, murdered by her husband, b) the men in the neighborhood are all members of a terrorist cell, and are planing to blow up an airplane carrying a UN delegation to Iraq, along with Avantika’s reporter friend, c) Ehsaan is a member of the terrorist cell, and has been since before she met him, and d) it turns out marrying a man you barely know is a bad idea, no matter how persistent he is.

Avantika tries to warn her reporter friend about the bomb, but she’s too late and the plane is destroyed. Ehsaan insists that, while she does know too much, they don’t have to kill Avantika, so instead the cell keep her in a sort of house arrest while they plan for their real target. Her only hope is Riyaaz (Vivek Oberoi), a reporter who is determined to infiltrate the cell and bring its members to justice. Unfortunately, Riyaaz is determined to bring down the terrorist cell by himself, so he hasn’t notified anybody of what he knows or what he’s doing.

Kurbaan is trying very hard to be evenhanded about a very sensitive issue, but it does so in a strange and lopsided manner. We get to hear the terrorists’ speeches about their grievances, but we also get a good look at the horrible consequences of their actions. In contrast, the only real argument presented for the “not a terrorist” side is the lack of people being brutally murdered. (Granted, that is a pretty compelling argument.) And the presentation of Muslims in the film is relentlessly one sided; apart from Avantika’s reporter friend, all of the Muslim women in the film are strongly traditional housewives who do what their husbands tell them, and with one exception, every Muslim man in the film is a terrorist or at best a terrorist sympathizer. For that matter, while the film does present a Muslim hero, Riyaaz himself is every bit as driven by anger and revenge as the terrorists he’s trying to stop.

There’s a Mitchell and Webb sketch about the writers of a medical drama who deliberately do not do the research because they want to focus on the drama, rather than on the medicine. Kurbaan seems to have been made with a similar philosophy in mind. That’s not an entirely bad thing, because the drama itself is quite good; Ehsaan in particular is an impressively complicated character, an unrepentant and highly skilled terrorist (he kills a guy with a fork!) who genuinely loves his wife and can’t quite understand why she’s mad at him. While Saif Ali is never quite as brilliant as he was in Being Cyrus or Omkara, it’s an impressively nuanced performance, a suitable blend of romantic charm and subdued menace.

On the other hand, the terrorism plot doesn’t quite hold together; neither terrorism nor America work that way. Leaving aside nit-picky details like Ehsaan’s class, in which he, Riyaaz, and several privileged white kids hold a spirited (if a bit one sided) conversation about the ethics of terrorism in perfect Hindi, there are some serious problems in the narrative, most notably the initial plane bombing. In the real world, this would be one of the most successful terrorist attacks in American history, but in the movie the terrorists themselves dismiss it as a mere prelude to their real attack, and the case is assigned to one overworked guy at the FBI (Carl Burrows), despite the fact that an entire UN delegation was killed, making it a major international incident.

Kurbaan features some strong performances, particularly from Khan, and the film features some lovely cinematography. However, the movie is never as profound as it would like to be, and there are . . . problems with the plot.