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Ananth Mahadevan’s eighth film as director, Red Alert — The War Within, is unlike anything he has attempted before. It marks a sharp departure as much from his own body of work as from the Hindi cinema as a whole. Red Alert is a gritty, gripping cracker of a film that journeys into one of India’s darkest corners — the Maoist-infested jungles of Andhra Pradesh — in search of the last vestiges of humanity in a benighted landscape and comes up with a timely and searing portrait of a people at odds with themselves.
In the director’s words, this reality-inspired tale of a simple villager, Narasimha, whose bitter struggle for survival pits him against his own conscience and his violent environs is "brutally uncompromising". Co-scripted by Mahadevan himself and writer-filmmaker Aruna Raje, Red Alert steers clear of conventional narrative ingredients and settles for a minimalist but edgy style completely in sync with the unrelentingly bleak setting of the drama. "I was absolutely clear that I did not want any melodrama or emotive scenes. This film wouldn’t have worked any other way," says theatre, television and film veteran Mahadevan, who debuted as a big-screen director in 2002 with the retro musical, Dil Vil Pyaar Vyaar, and followed that up with films like Dil Maange More, Aksar and Aggar. Besides Suniel Shetty, who plays Narasimha with just the right mix of vulnerability and virility, Red Alert has an array of fine actors in the cast — Vinod Khanna, Ashish Vidyarthy, Seema Biswas, Ayesha Dharkar, Makarand Deshpande and Naseeruddin Shah. "Initially, it was a tad difficult for some of the actors to reconcile themselves to the tone and approach of the film. But once they got the hang of things, they gave their roles everything they had," says Mahadevan. That assertion is as true about Sameera Reddy, who assumes a completely deglamourised persona as a rookie Maoist, as about the rest of the ensemble cast. Red Alert, which won a critics’ award at the Stuttgart ‘Bollywood and Beyond’ Film Festival earlier this year, fetched lead actor Suniel Shetty a prize for best acting at the recent South Asian International Film Festival (SAIFF) in New York. "Just imagine," says the Bollywood star, "I’ve been in the industry for nearly 20 years and I never won any award for acting. And now I have an international award in my kitty." "I’m so happy for Suniel," says Mahadevan. "He really got into the skin of Narasimha." The screen character emerged from a newspaper report that the director had read a year or so ago about a man on the run from both the police and his one-time comrades, the Maoists. In the film, poverty and the need to educate his children force this hapless man into a Maoist ‘dalam’, transforming a timid villager into an unwilling killer. But by the time he manages to break free from the cycle of violence, he has made too many enemies for his own good. "Red Alert isn’t so much about the problem of Maoism as it is about one man cornered by a system that he can barely comprehend," explains Mahadevan. "In essence, the human drama is universal despite the fact that it addresses a burning Indian issue. All rebellions begin with a just cause and then distortions creep in and violence takes over." Shetty, on his part, has reason to be pleased as punch at how the film has shaped up. "The discussions that we had prior to and during the shoot really helped me grasp the essence of the character," says the actor, who has built his career predominantly around action films and comedies. "The last offbeat film I did was Gulzar’s Hu Tu Tu. That was another high point." Shetty feels that having a woman as a screenwriter helped. "The humanist perspective and the strong female characters set Red Alert apart... What the film says in no uncertain terms is that violence can never be a solution." Red Alert was shot in the jungles around Khandala and Lonavala. "We first hunted for locations near Tirupati but were warned that the forest was actually in the control of Maoists," recalls Mahadevan. "Then we checked out spots near Wayanad in Kerala. The forest there was too exotic to pass off as Andhra locations. We eventually realised that Khandala-Lonavala area matched the Andhra Pradesh landscape down to the height and look of the trees." Of course, the contemporary relevance of Red Alert in the Indian context is pretty obvious. Mahadevan is hopeful that the film will strike a chord in this country just the way it has wherever in the world it has been shown so far. The film had a red carpet premiere at Goa during the 40th International Film Festival of India. "After Goa, we will be exploring the possibilities of an international release," says Mahadevan. Indeed, Red Alert has the potential to go places.
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