A young girl shivers with a bomb strapped to her chest in the middle of the road. A one-man bomb disposal expert sweats as he attempts to detonate the explosive while it’s ticking away. At the last moment, he gets pliers to break the fat stubborn lock and belt around her, sweats some more, steps back, and apologises to little Fatima. The onlookers move away aghast, leaving the girl to explode.
It’s a stark welcome that Jyoti (Nushrratt Bharuccha) gets in ISIS-infested Mosul.
Iraq, 2014. Where Jyoti, desperately seeking employment, lands to work in a clothes-manufacturing factory.
But the nail-biting starkness of the human bomb remains an isolated piece of effective cinema as Jyoti’s survival adventure in the desert country plods along without further excitement.
In a short flashback, director Pranay Meshram who writes along with Ayush Tiwari, Gunjan Saxena and Aseem Ahmed Abbasee, establishes Jyoti as a young woman who has the courage to intervene and speak up on behalf of a senior colleague who’s being bullied. A woman with the moral compass to do what’s right, never mind the consequences.
Qualities that serve her well when ISIS militants overrun Iraq, enter the factory and take the women as captives. Given ISIS’ sordid track record with sex slaves, Jyoti’s future doesn’t have to be spelt out.
Meshram puts it across visually with Wahab (Israeli actor Amir Boutrous), a lollipop-sucking menace, picking Jyoti from a sea of captives in black naqab for a humiliating romp under the shower. Wahab doesn’t factor in Jyoti’s spunk.
But the fight has just begun for her. Assad (Tsahi Halevi, another Israeli actor), also an ISIS leader, steps in to claim Jyoti as his fourth begum. After punishing her with brutal sexual assault for what she did to Wahab.
Jyoti’s escape from hell, along with two terrified minor girls, is a story of exemplary courage and much cinematic license as she drives and wears out a red car, outwits jeeps with militants spilling out, and dodges Assad’s entire army in an airport sequence.
Before the wheels of success touch down safely in Baghdad.
Just to be clear that ISIS is the only criminal and not Iraq, Meshram throws in a soft romance between manager Rafiq (Nishant Dahiya) and Jyoti, there are several rounds of cheers with chai and a Punjabi number in the background. Factory owner Noor Banoo (Piloo Vidyarthi) has the double duty of showing women as emancipated enough to run a business in Iraq besides being the benign face of the country.
Since the notorious sex slave sickness of the ISIS is a known reality, and there have been graphic digital visuals of desperate people fleeing countries like Afghanistan by holding on to or hiding within the wheels of a plane, Akelli comes off as an amalgam of real incidents from a troubled part of the world.
There are twists too. Like an innocuous TV interview by Jyoti’s mother in India which leads to a heart-thumping moment at the airport. Or when Jyoti vanishes as the plane takes off.
But neither the touch of authenticity nor the apt choice of Uzbekistan to resemble Iraq make an impact as there is an insipidness in the telling and fatigue in the unending escape, treachery and climax. The thrill of a woman’s survival drama required sparkling edge-of-the-seat writing, direction and cinematography for the tension to come through. There is also convenient writing. Like Jyoti selling off all her gold in India to pay the agent for an assignment in Mosul. She might as well have used the money to stay on in India until she got a safer job closer home. Two familiar faces from the blockbuster Israeli series Fauda and Nusratt’s valiant performance are not enough to engage the viewer. From the title, one gathers that the makers believe in numerology. But it would require more than just lucky spellings to get this Bharat ki beti to the winning post.
Rating: 1.5/5
Watch Akelli Trailer
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