CAST: Sunny Deol, Sunil Shetty, Akshaye Khanna, Jackie Shroff, Tabu, Pooja Bhatt, Sharbani Mukherjee, Sapna Bedi and Rakhee. DIRECTOR: J P Dutta.

Accurate facts, but treatment too simplistic! Where are the multiple pickets of the original Major Kuldeep Singh, all strategically placed to create the illusion of a much larger Indian defense? Where is the drama of humiliation as the Pakistanis retreat?

One single query from a martial colleagues about their love lives gives rise to a series of three flashbacks as the Defence guys pour out their amorous exploits .. too straight-forward! And for approximately six or seven reels after the interval, we see and hear cannons right, left and behind with micro insertions of a few towering deaths… too easy! Evidently, Border lacks the screenplay jugglery that elevates war movies to stupendous heights.

Never has a war movie been known by the degree of bombings and batonings they have shown. It is the tapestry of individual and collective human emotions and conflicts and the situations that they have to deal with within the boundaries of regimentalised ethics of duty, discipline and deliberation, that makes a war epic engaging. But despite putting in a tremendous amount of hard work and relating so well with the subject matter, JP Dutta seems to have missed the vital focus of a war narrative. He has missed out, for example, on what Bernard Shaw meant when he said wars are fought not on the battle field but in cushy cabins over coffee tables. He has missed out on the gripping ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ in his effort to make the ‘whats’ look authentic.

And yet, the film can’t be dismissed easily. How often have we had a war film from Bollywood involving 40 real tanks and 300 members of an Army unit, with a desert as a war field? Apart from the principal actors, reportedly, the rest of the cast – the pilots, the tank drivers, the soldiers – are all from the Indian Army. And this is probably the first time that a war film has been made in this country using real arms and ammunition.

As far as the structure goes, Border tries to tell the story of The Battle of Longewal. With the slight nip of the war in the air, Indian Defence gears its Army and Air Force for an impending conflict. Longewala, at the Rajasthan border however, isn’t considered a very great risk area and Major Kuldeep Singh (Sunny Deol) has only a tiny consignment of 120 soldiers in his command.

Once the Major lands there, he comes across a young colt, Second Lt. Dharmveer (Akshaye Khanna), son of a martyr who the Major used to know in the past. Another braveheart of the land is the BSF guy Bhairav Singh (Sunil Shetty) who can communicate with the locals and the desert sand with equal ease and abandon. In addition, there is a ‘leave obsessed’ Subedar Mathura Das (Sudesh Berry), and the macho, Sher-e-Punjab, Ratan Sigh (Puneet Issar), to complete a sensitive but brave core bunch of officers.

But then, that isn’t enough! Wouldn’t you want to know the women behind these brave soldiers? At least for some songs to be sung! On an ‘I’ll-tell-you-mine, you-tell-me-yours’ kind of session on a relaxed moonlit night, we get a glimpse of Sunil Shetty’s and Akshaye Khanna’s Cupid sessions. In fulfilling his father’s dreams by joining the Army, Officer Dharmveer Singh also bowls over his childhood sweetheart, Kammo (Pooja Bhatt). After an exuberant duet with her, however, he suddenly has to leave Kammo high and dry. Just when he is about to get married a war alert is declared and after that we don’t see Kammo at all.

Bhairav Singh has been a trifle more lucky. He receives the telegram to return to the army on the stroke of his suhaag raat which he manages to complete and even sings a lilting song, Ae jaate hue lamhe… After that we hear about his wife only once, when he receives a letter telling him he’s about to become a father!

Similarly, we get to see a glimpse of Wing Commander Jackie Shroff’s love life too, when one of his colleagues jokingly asks why he is yet unmarried. Another flashback tells us that he got hooked on to someone who never stooped to anything or anyone. So our high flier once flew a Fighter Jet just above her so she could duck. This infuriates her no end because she had to bend down to someone. But soon after, she is saved by the WC from an impending accident and she finally succumbs to his charms. So much for character development!

But the funniest of all is Major Sunny Deol’s threat to his wife, Tabu. When she tries to stop his transfer to the border through her politically connected father, he point-blank announces that he’ll divorce her if she tried any such manoeuvring. The same Major, a little later in the story, also inspires the ‘leave obsessed’ Subedar to come back to help his Company, halfway through his journey to his wife suffering from cancer! Some inspiration and some transformation, this.

The flashbacks and little details done away within straight cutaway narrative structure, the 23^rd Punjab regiment spends days and weeks waiting for the impending attack. Soon some of them start getting restless and bored. And then, when finally the attack takes place, the Major asks the Wing Commander for help only to learn that they won’t be able to till the first rays of the sun stream in. In the next six reels, we have the Major holding fort and bravehearts like Akshaye Khanna, Sunil Shetty, Puneet Issar, Sudesh Berry and even the cook, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, giving up their lives one by one, with frequent cuts to Jackie Shroff and his team, waiting for dawn to break as he does not have fighters that can spot the tanks and bomb them at night in the desert. Obviously no one has though of contingency planning or backup.

But then, they all have been too busy singing Sandese aate hain ….. Sunny Deol when angry, breaks into his high-pitch voice in the style patented after Ghayal and Damini. When he gets a chance, he also converses with the Commander of the enemy camp, some 500 meters away (at least), Tu wohi hai na… ghulam dastageer… Lahore ke gandee nallee ka keeda… No speakers, no amplifiers! And before you wonder if the words have reached the enemy commander, you hear the Lahore ke gandee nallee ka keeda volley back equally provocative rhetoric.

No, the film is not a very good war film, inspite of its attempts to be serious and authentic. The performances are definitely a redeeming feature. Sunny Deol, Jackie Shroff, Akshaye Khanna, Sunil Shetty, Puneet Issar and Kulbhushan Kharbanda all of them have come up with highly credible performances. One sees very little of Tabu and Pooja Bhatt and even less of debutantes Sharbani Mukherji and Sapna Bedi.

The background score is appealing and the camera work sufficiently gripping. Through his songs, Anu Malik once again sends a reminder to whoever has branded him a confirmed plagiarist or ‘inspired man’, by coming up with a very few soul-stirring numbers. Javed Akhtar, in his characteristic way, has painted a simple but sensitive tapestry of void, yearning and helplessness as well as of courage, death and carnage. Unfortunately, JP Dutta has failed to do with his screenplay and characters what Akhtar has managed to do with his lyrics. Yet, for all its failings, Border is by far the best war movie that Bollywood has churned out, to date.

- Brahmanand Singh in Screen June 20, 1997

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