Tehran Review | A Geopolitical Drama That Aspires a Lot but Achieves Only Somewhat

There are patches in the movie Tehran, where one can see the makers trying to depict the intensity of covert operations. Written by Bindni Karia and directed by Arun Gopalan, this long-delayed film, which eventually skipped theatrical release and premiered on ZEE5, is a mixed-bag geopolitical drama that deserves a little more fine-tuning in the writing. With the basicness of the idea getting forgotten in the second half, largely due to the gravity of the situation, Tehran has an honest intention, but fumbles in staging the drama.

An attack on the Israeli embassy staff happened in 2012. One of the casualties of that incident was an orphan child who sold flowers at traffic junctions. ACP Rajeev Kumar, who was deeply affected by the death of that child, decides to go after the people behind the attack. What we see in the movie is the steps taken by Rajeev Kumar to ensure justice and how that came in the way of India and Iran’s Gas Deal, which was in the discussion stage at that time.

The idea of an Indian officer getting stuck in foreign territory in a diplomatic scene between Iran and Israel, and him losing the support of his country, has enough drama to make someone think about writing a movie. Director Arun Gopalan has aspirations to present the movie as a gritty and realistic one. The handheld cinematography of the movie, along with its pale-colored visual texture, definitely gives us those Zero Dark Thirty vibes. At one point, I thought this movie would end up looking like a pro-Israel film, as there were scenes of the Israelis getting attacked, and the villain here was an Iranian. However, the movie decides to distance itself from taking a side, and they have included a scene in the film where the hero tells an Israeli who helped him that his mission is only to avenge, and not to judge.

While the first half is pretty fast-paced and somewhat lacks depth, the second half is more dramatic and action-driven. In the second half, the gaze of the movie towards geopolitics and its inner games changes. While the basic idea is to kill the person responsible for the death of an innocent girl, on that journey, our hero meets people from both sides of the tension, and he finds certain emotional parallels in them. After the initial surge of looking like a wannabe diplomatic thriller, I thought the movie kind of found its balance in the second half when the Story was nearing the main destination, Iran. There is a mannequin challenge-like staging to the inciting incident of the movie. The makers who were so careful in making sure that characters in the film used the old-style flip phone forgot the fact that most of the vehicles they used in that scene were not available in 2012. I can understand messing up models, but using the Tata Punch in a staged scene set in 2012? Not a great job! There are some sequences with patchy visual effects. But that is very minimal.

John Abraham gets a well-balanced character that is masculine in the way we associate him with, and at the same time, there is a sense of groundedness to the way that character is portrayed, which makes Rajeev Kumar a lot more real rather than a hero. Manushi Chhillar as SI Divya with that clumsy wig doesn’t have much to do here. In terms of screen time, it is Neeru Bajwa who gets another prominent role in the film, and she performed the character very neatly on screen. Hadi Khanjanpour, who played the part of the antagonist, was a bit too animated towards the climax.

I don’t know whether the movie got trimmed considerably because of the decision to make it an OTT release. Because there are a lot of personal elements vaguely mentioned in the first half that never got a proper payoff in a later stage. Considering the jingoistic tone of the movies that are being made these days, there is a palpable amount of calmness to the way Tehran looks at the patriotic theme. Somewhere, I felt the movie couldn’t fully connect its characters with the audience.