Udta Teer

There is a distinct moment in Aakash Kaushik’s Udta Teer where the film, much like its titular airborne projectile, loses its trajectory entirely. It begins with the intoxicating promise of a high-wire act. A sharp, irreverent subversion of the subcontinental spy thriller. The premise itself is delightfully absurd. Bilal (Ayushmann Khurrana), an undercover Pakistani mole embedded deep within India’s counter-terrorism service under the alias Vikrant, suffers a convenient bout of amnesia. He wakes up thoroughly convinced that he is a hyper-patriotic, flag-waving Indian counter-intelligence officer. What follows is a comedy of profound errors as a man who is supposed to sabotage the nation becomes its most zealous, unpredictable protector, leaving both sides of the border thoroughly bewildered.

Directed by writer-turned-director Akash Kaushik, Udta Teer wants to be a Dhurandhar when it comes to patriotism but a comedy when it comes to everything else. The result is a film caught between two incompatible impulses. One moment, it is a straight-faced spy thriller invoking desh bhakti with songs like Jai Hind gaaye; the next, it breaks into comedy, as if it cannot bear to take itself seriously for too long. While some of the humour lands, the patriotism is largely performative, playing to the gallery without making much of an impact.

Of the many musical gags in Udta Teer, one made me surprisingly wistful. Agent Vikrant (Ayushmann Khurrana) watching the video for A.R. Rahman’s ‘Maa Tujhe Salaam’ and becoming emotional is intended as parodic patriotism. But it reminded me of when this version of ‘Vande Mataram’ came out in 1997 and was received as a dynamic reworking, not an imposition. It’s also hard not to think of ‘Gurus of Peace’, a Rahman-Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan track on the same album, especially when Udta Teer reminds us, with a cover of ‘Dum Mast Qalandar’ playing over a shootout, how Pakistan’s music is still a presence in our films but not Pakistani artists.

A well-trained Pakistani spy sent on a mission to destabilise India post-Operation Sindoor suffers a grievous head injury. He loses his memory. His bosses in Rawalpindi go into a tizzy, his accomplices in India are caught in a bind and the film about an amnesiac secret agent’s erratic exploits flies off on a merry but uneven tangent. What’s not to like in this harmless cockeyed concoction, one might ask. A lot because the arrow that Udta Teer refers has a rather blunt head that knows not where it is headed? There is a great deal in Udta Teer that keeps spiralling out of control as the film makes its way through an exercise that harks back in spirit, but certainly not in substance, to the Hollywood spy parodies that Mel Brooks and Mike Myers powered many decades ago with considerable commercial success.

Excess of anything will only lead to a spoof of it. After Dhurandhar opened a Pandora’s box of sharp spies infiltrating and extracting revenge from the “padosi mulk”, the misfits too followed suit. In the same vein of Happy Patel: Khatarnaak Jasoos and the recent Vibe, we get another spy-comedy Udta Teer, a Uno-reverse of Dhurandhar. It’s an amusing concept: a proficient Pakistani spy living as a mole in an Indian agency loses his memory after an accident and starts thinking of himself as a patriotic Indian agent. What follows is a funny, absurd situation filled with confusions, crosses and double-crosses. It’s hilarious till it isn’t. Sadly, novelty has a short shelf life.

The enduring conflicts between India and Pakistan have spawned countless narratives, alternately celebrated, romanticised and vilified on either side of the border, depending on the prevailing political climate. These stories are often fuelled by hostility and nationalist fervour, yet paradoxically accommodate moments of affection, shared sentiment and enduring human connection. For unimaginative screenwriters, few subjects offer such an apparently inexhaustible reservoir of dramatic possibilities as the fraught relationship between these neighbouring nations. Divided by history, politics and ideology, India and Pakistan nevertheless remain bound by a shared cultural inheritance, their destinies intertwined in ways that transcend the animosities separating them.

A Pakistani spy loses his memory and unwittingly starts working for Indian intelligence. Sometimes, a single-sentence logline is enough to trigger an urge to watch a film. Writer Aakash Kaushik, making his directorial debut with an espionage satire, nails that hook. Memory is perhaps a spy’s biggest asset. He assumes a new identity, but what happens if the operative sheds his original personality altogether? It opens floodgates for creative possibilities. When Bilal Ahmad (Ayushmann Khurrana), a Pakistani mole who has infiltrated an Indian security agency, loses recollection of his true role in a sudden blast, the script flips the spy action genre on its head.