Anek Movie Review: It feels distant, like it’s in the northeast.
There’s too much going on in this film simultaneously, with no time for the audience to sit and stare at the characters they’re casually staring at. As a result, no one is sufficiently humanized despite the meager efforts. As a result, they appear/feel distant. Or at least as far away as India’s North-East seems to the rest of the country.
This is the setting for this film, with no specific state mentioned among the “seven sisters.”
Essentially, the North East is a battleground for secession. With several rebel groups acting as pawns and allegiances to people in Myanmar across the border implied.
This ethnic conflict reads exactly like Nagaland. The leader of a group like the NSCN, Tiger Sanga (Loitongbam Dorendra), leads peace talks with the Indian government. Above all, a Kashmiri Muslim national security adviser (Manoj Pahwa) shows India’s security apparatus in the region from New Delhi. But, of course, this could be a scientific fantasy.
A perpetual sniffling His hatta-Katta hound on the ground is Ayushmann Khurrana. Who plays an undercover Indian spy who forms and fights rebel groups.
How far can a cop/spy be from the people he observes, no matter how far they are from the world he comes from? Without, of course, lowering his guard.
This aspect is mentione, but not in the way that a James Bond or Jason Bourne could go completely rogue!
Khurrana’s character appears to be base on a local girl (Andrea Kevichüsa) with personal ambitions in international-level boxing a feat that can only be accomplish behind a national flag.
If this were just the story of one girl, it would be similar to the biopic of Mary Kom (2014). The world boxing champion from Manipur, another North East state undergoing an insurgency or liberation war against India.
It appears that sports are the source of personal nationalism. Otherwise, petty discrimination is the rule. That point is well made in this film. Axone (2019) by Nicholas Kharkongor was a more personal, insider’s look at the kind of segregation/prejudice. That people from the North-East face in Mainland India (meaning east of the ‘Chicken Neck’).
