There’s been a lot of talk about Cavite and Aamir. So I decided to watch them both. First, Cavite. The next day, Aamir. At the end of it, I wanted to dissect both and figure out why I reacted the way I did to each. So here it is.
*Warning: This whole article is one big spoiler. Consider yourself alerted.*
Both stories are about a regular guy who heads back home (in the case of Cavite, to the Philippines, in Aamir, to Mumbai, India). When they land, they are not greeted by their families but instead with the news that the families have been kidnapped. To secure their release, they must follow the instructions of the baddie terrorist.
Both films give us enough of a background on the protagonists.
Cavite - The film spends some time showing us the depressingly dull life Adam lives as a security guard. His father dies in a bus explosion in Manila and as he heads home, he learns that his girlfriend is going to abort his child, driving him further into depression. He half-heartedly tries to overdose in an airport bathroom. That’s his mental state as he lands in the Philippines for his father’s funeral. Why spend so much time on the background? Well - wait till we finish this exercise.
Aamir - The scene with the immigration agent is very good - it tell us who Aamir his, his occupation (doctor in the UK) and also tees up the conflict to come - Aamir is returning home, but even there he’s treated as somewhat of a suspect due to his religion.
Where the films are starkly different is how they deal with the antagonist.
Cavite - We never see the antagonist. He’s only a voice throughout the whole film. I really liked this. Terrorists are nameless, faceless people and Cavite kept to that theme. His voice could at times be soothing - almost nice to poor Adam - and at other times, cruel and unforgiving. You don’t get a sense for who he is. Only that he is powerful, is watching everything all the time, and will have no compunction in making Adam pay if he disobeys. We hear Adam’s mother and sister, but again, we don’t see them either.
Aamir - We see the terrorist - a solid man, requisitely bald and with a mustache. We get glimpses of his kid and his spouse, in what seems to be large, oldish house with high ceilings. The message that even outwardly ordinary folks can be terrorists come across nicely. However, we never see Aamir’s family or hear them even though they are “in the living room”.
While both antagonists get their victims to do their bidding, the approach is quite different. Both send their victims off into the unsavory parts of the city to impress upon them the plight of their Muslim brethren, but the cruelty levels differ considerably.
Cavite - From the beginning, the terrorist makes it clear that he’s in charge. He knows everything about Adam. In an early scene, he tells Adam to pick up a pack of cigarettes that he’s placed there and inside Adam finds his sister’s thumb. As he hurls it away in fear and disgust, the terrorist makes it quite clear that there are consequences for disobedience. Surefire way to instill fear, panic and implicit obedience. Of course Adam, now shaken, follows his every word. But even here, Adam pushes his limits. He tests the terrorists to see what he can get away with and sometimes (like in the case of looking at the bomb - see below), he goes too far. This is what anyone would do - see how much they can get away with.
Aamir - This terrorist also knows everything about his victim, but there is no real punishment when Aamir pauses instead of following implicitly. When Aamir looks at the police station, a guy appears and says “don’t even think about it”, but there’s zero consequence. No little sibling even gets spanked! Besides the initial video of the family in a living room, Aamir doesn’t ask for any more proof that they are alive. The only other time we see the kidnapped family is when Aamir imagines them being tortured. The only hold over Aamir is his family and we never hear them? And more importantly, never see them hurt even in a small way? That was a bit weak for my taste.
Oh, and why on earth does it take Aamir *at least* three rings of the cell phone before he ever picks it up?! If a terrorist has your family, wouldn’t you pick up the phone as soon as the first ring starts? Wouldn’t you stop in the middle of the street, drop everything to get the phone immediately? That never happens here - he’s always la-la-la, let me finish what I’m doing and get to the phone after it has rung three times. Argh! That little nit drove me crazy as I watched it. Primarily because this is a thriller - build the tension throughout the movie instead of just at the end… I wanted to see more tension, to see Aamir more afraid and panicked.
Aamir, as a character, also seems somewhat spineless to me. He is an obedient puppy dog. In fact, there is a scene where the terrorist taps a toy monkey on the head and it claps. This is supposed to symbolize his control over Aamir. Aamir is just too much of a milk toast for my liking - he’s pretty spineless through the whole movie. The only exception to this is when he thinks he’s lost the suitcase and goes in after the baddies with a big pipe and beats the crap out of them. That level of desperation was perfect. (As an aside, the music in the scene was also excellent.)
In terms of the “why me?” question, again, the films differ in how they deal with it.
Cavite - The terrorist tells Adam that his father ripped them off and then fled the country. To pay for that, his father was forced to detonate a bomb on a bus (yes, that’s the father from the opening scene.) He wasn’t an innocent victim, he was the bomber! Now, this is the next step. Adam will complete paying the debt.
Aamir - Why Aamir is the chosen one is a bit vague, but sufficient. The terrorist alludes to “look at how much your fellow muslims around the world contribute” and to the London bombing and Aamir running away from that. But it is not clearly spelled out why it is Aamir and not some other poor sap who got off the flight. This didn’t bother me too much because in reality terror victims can be chosen very randomly and there is enough allusion to cover it.
The mid-sections of both films feel a touch bloated.
Cavite - There’s a scene where badman specifically has someone killed in front of Adam to further instill fear - this scene felt forced. Was the only point to scare him? Why? He’s already very scared. Is it to show that killing is also as easy as cutting off a finger? I think Adam already got that. Then there’s the whole “swap” the bag issue. In Cavite, Adam’s bag is stolen by a little street urchin and Adam disobeys instructions and chases him. The urchin still gets away and Adam is brought back under control. Then, he’s asked to go a home where two little boys are held hostage, take their picture to their father, the bank manager, and get cash in exchange. This cash is then taken to a cockfighting arena and swapped for… his bag! Ok, fine, he needed to get the cash his father stole, but why steal his bag elaborately? Just tell him - hand over your bag to the kid. He’s not in any position to argue, is he?
Aamir - the whole “the suitcase has money, oh no it is a bomb” thing is a bit wasteful. I agree with Dabba that this wasted a ton of time and the movie did not progress much the whole time he’s chasing after the suitcase. And all the chasing around - what for? Just to do the switch? Damn - there had to be an easier way! Have a junior badman follow him to the bathroom and offer to hold the suitcase and do the swap there. If he’s not going to check it again after not having it in his possession for half an hour, why would he check it again after a pee-break? Then again, why tell him it is even money? Why not just lock the suitcase and put a bomb in it to start with? Does the terrorist need to kidnap a whole family just to have Aamir drop off money? The whole suitcase swap was a good chunk of film time…
The reveal of the bomb is also handled very differently in both films
Cavite - Once Adam gets his bag back, he immediately wants to know what’s in it because it feels different. Terrorist threatens him not to open it. Adam can’t help it. He has to open it. He has to know what he’s carrying. He opens the bag and freaks out that it is a bomb. Right then his cell phone dies. His panic is evident as mild-mannered Adam snatches a cell phone away from a lady bystander and then calls the terrorist back. The terrorist has Adam walk over to a street where a gaggle of kids are hunched over… Adam’s mother’s tongue! The terrorist cut off his mother’s tongue as punishment for the disobedience. It is very freaky - Adam breaks down and begs. It is powerful - the complete and total ownership of Adam even though what he has to do is so terrible.
Aamir - See above for the suitcase runaround. Aamir discovers it is a bomb in the final scene. He’s on the bus with his suitcase. Terrorist calls him and tells him to leave the suitcase there and get off. Only at that point does he realize it is a bomb. The only issue is that there is little to no time in the movie for Aamir to be conflicted. The ending is rushed.
With regard to the ending itself, I have no real quibble with how either film ended even though they are polar opposites of each other.
Cavite - Adam places the bomb in a church. Then the enormity of what he’s doing hits him. He refuses to leave. Again the terrorist points out that he has no choice but to obey him and commands him to leave. He does. He’s then given instructions on how to find his family . He’s then back to his life in the US - we see him talking to his sister on the phone; his girlfriend tells him she had an abortion because she couldn’t stand to have a muslim baby. He’s back in the reality of his life - the same shit as before, but now he has to deal with being a mass murder. Whamo!
Aamir - Aamir is really left only two choices by the terrorist. Let the people die or die himself. In the former, he would have done as commanded and would get his family back. But once he decides not to kill the innocent passengers, he doesn’t really have much of a choice - if he doesn’t detonate the bomb on the bus and he lives, he’s likely going to see his family be killed, so the only option he has is to kill himself. Now the issue here is that Aamir never tries to defy the terrorist before. He never tests the waters on how far he can go. This is the first time he ever disobeys an instruction. I just wish he’d done some of that before - established he had a spine somewhere during the movie instead of just at the end.
That’s the story. Now let’s move on to style. Here the two movies could not be more different-
Cavite is clearly guerilla filmmaking. A large chunk of the film where the camera follows Adam is all handheld (not steady-cam). There is a lot of dialog where Adam is in the frame, but his words are in the form of a voiceover. Often one sentence is a voiceover where we see him (but his lips don’t move) and then he speaks the next sentence on camera. But somehow this works - it works partly because this is done consistently and so you get used to it and it works party because the dialog is so basic, so shredded down to the core that you know he has to ask that anyway.
The antagonist is only a voice. Again, this may have been done due to cost/production issues since it is so much easier to get all the dialog at once in a sound room, but it added to the movie - it made the antagonist the nameless, faceless puppetmaster terrorist. In fact, the voice was “uncredited” in the credits. It worked wonderfully.
There are scenes where the lighting is poor. There are scenes where the sound is crappy. Some of them are a bit jarring. But keep in mind that this film was made for pretty much no budget (under $10k!) The writers Ian Gamazon and Neill Dela Llana, take on every role in the cast and crew - Gamzon is the lead actor, they direct, produce, and crew. Most of the other actors are family. This film should be added in with Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi on how to make a solid movie with no money!
Aamir has excellent production values. This is a “real” movie. There are no sound issues. No lighting issues. There are some very nice touches - for example, as Aamir walks back through the market after picking up the red suitcase, we see a lot of red - a shot of the suitcase and the feet in the marketplace has red swirling sarees, red meat being cut, red handbag, red shirt, and several red buses all lined up in traffic. In the market, everyone there seems to look at him - they either know what’s going on and are silent spectators, or it is in his imagination. Nicely done.
The background scores in Aamir were also excellent across the board. I still remember a lot of it. The same can’t be said for Cavite…
And finally, we come to the big question - is Aamir a ripoff of Cavite? I don’t think so. Just look at all the stuff above - besides the premise, the two films handle almost everything else very differently. I believe Anurag when he says that Raj Kumar did not watch Cavite before he made Aamir. I also truly believe that two people can have a similar idea. You only have to look at the technology world to see that it is true - how many music recommendation sites are there? Tons. They all popped up at the same time because the idea itself is easy to have. How many blog comment systems are there? Several. All funded by competing venture capitalists. Again, one did not copy the other. People had similar ideas to fulfill a need they saw and at the end of the day, there are only so many ways that you can execute the idea.
It’s my belief that RK made the best story he could based on the idea he had. Apparently the producers also bought the remake rights to Cavite (just to be on the safe side) and in a classy move, RK thanks Gamzon and Dela Llana in the opening titles. I liked the movie. And in the Indian context where stark “message” movies without songs and dancing are hard to make and harder to market, it is a great step in the right direction.
This is a debut feature - I am a huge fan of debut features. I cheer for them because it is a sign of yet another person who’s overcome the odds to make his or her first film. So, congratulations, Raj Kumar - you’ve made something you should be very proud of!!
But… I liked Cavite more. Was it because I was amazed at what they accomplished despite the budget? Possibly. Was it because the style matched the genre and the story was pretty tight? Yes. Was it because I liked the ending - where the everyday victim does the everyday thing - no heroics, no histrionics? Yes. I just like gritty, real movies. And that’s what Cavite was.
At the end of the day though, they are both solid films - similar in the premise, but different in many ways. As I said up top, I just wanted to dissect both and figure out why I reacted the way I did to each. That’s why my title for this post is not Cavite vs. Aamir, but rather Cavite “and” Aamir.
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