The Warrior, written and directed by Asif Kapadia, a
British director of Indian heritage, is now four years old, but it
is only just getting a release in the U.S. This is long overdue. It
is a beautiful film with the mythic force of a parable, and its
simple but engaging story is told in a slow, spacious, rather
oriental style. Contributing to the effect is the fact that it is
set in a quasi-mythic time and place: an indigenous, pre-modern
despotism in the desert of Rajasthan. This is the sort of place
where the despot’s factor sits barefoot and cross-legged under an
awning to receive the tribute of the surrounding villages. When the
elderly representative of a village called Taramy pleads that it
has been drought-stricken and is unable to pay the full amount, the
factor orders his head struck off forthwith. For him it seems a
matter of no more moment than swatting a fly, and it can be hardly
more so for Lafcadia (Irfan Khan), the man who is instructed to
carry out the sentence and who subsequently becomes the hero
ofThe Warrior.
He and three or four other warriors — perhaps the whole of the
despot’s military strength — are then sent to burn Taramy and put
it to the sword. That kind of thing is all in the day’s work for
them, we gather, and it never seems to occur to anyone, either the
warriors or their victims, that they might do anything but rape and
murder and burn in accordance with the despot’s orders. Yet in the
midst of the sack of the unfortunate village, Lafcadia is stopped
in his tracks when he turns his sword on a little girl, Mira
(Sunita Sharma), who happens to be wearing an amulet belonging to
his young son, Katiba (Puru Chibber). He had given it to her when
she had done him a small kindness. The shock of the warrior’s
recognition of the amulet and his moral transformation is
represented cinematically by an answering transformation of
everything in the picture except the two human figures in the
tableau, the one with his sword point held ready to strike at the
other’s throat. They remain frozen in that attitude while the
tumbledown desert town of Taramy magically becomes a wild mountain
scene blanketed in snow.
It is as if a lifetime has passed in an instant — the whole of
the life, perhaps, that has brought Lafcadia down from his mountain
home, Kullu, in the first place to seek service as a warrior for
the despot. When the scene shifts again to Taramy, Lafcadia lets
his sword drop and then looks down to see snow still under his
shoes. He vows never to lift his sword again and announces to
Katiba that they are to return to Kullu. For him it is the good
place, the holy city, the locus of peace and moral purity and
redemption. The visual contrast of desert and mountain, sand and
snow, becomes a running theme of the film and reinforces our sense
of the polarity between the world of the despot and his warriors on
the one hand and the poor peasants they prey upon on the other —
and so between evil and good, death and life. That visual presence
helps to create our sense of the permanence, the elemental quality
of such polarities. They are obviously not to be lightly
disregarded.
So it is that, at the news Lafcadia has deserted him, the despot
says to one of the remaining warriors: “No one leaves my service.
Bring me his head by dawn, or I will have yours.” It would have
been easy for the film to turn altogether moralistic about this: to
extend the imagery of good and evil to the ex-warrior and his
pursuer, respectively, but I don’t think this is The
Warrior’s purpose. We can hardly watch it without reading some
such meaning into the film, so completely is our own culture
committed to the ways of peace and non-violence and against the way
of the warrior, but Kapadia is more interested in his hero’s
personal search for redemption. The cruel world of the despot, that
is, is not somebody’s bad choice — not even the despot’s — and
Lafcadia’s decision to leave it a good one. Both are simply facts
of life, eternally present in the world like the desert and the
mountains, and the choices that are made and the terrible
sacrifices they entail both have an air of inevitability about
them.
Instead of moralizing, then, the movie means to create in us a
sense of that oriental duality between the worlds of the flesh and
the spirit — and of the magnetic repulsion that must always exist
between them. Even when the warrior is joined on his journey by a
young scamp and thief called Riaz (Noor Mani) or when he tries to
help an old blind woman (Damayanti Marfatia) on her way to a holy
lake in the mountains and is spurned by her after she touches him
and says that “there’s blood written in your face” — even these
events do not imply moral approval or disapproval. They only
illustrate what it means to move back and forth between
the two worlds, as people always have done and always will do.
Finally, the film’s use of visual contrast, its dreamlike feel and
flirtation with magic and prophecy, all go to suggest that the only
question that matters is which of the two worlds of desert or
mountain, of war or peace, of striving or of retreat and
contemplation, is the more real. And the answer is by no means to
be taken for granted.
