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| From http://www.nanarland.com/Chroniques/internationalguerillas/jaquette.jpg |
Dir. Jan Mohammed
Pakistan
Film #30 of The ‘Worst’ of Cinema
This review has been long is
gestation, since last year before this season came about; I have even read the Salman Rushdie novel The Satanic Verses, central to the
existence of this film, to give me background to this infamous ‘Lollywood’ film
from Pakistan. When author Rushdie
first published The Satanic Verses,
a magic realist story that tackled the divide between someone of West Asian
descent and a secondary identity of being British, and of the divide between
religious belief and doubt, he provoked outrage from Muslin communities for the
book, particularly a segment based on the prophet Muhammad where lines are
added into the Islamic rulings of there being three goddesses who can be
worshiped, the ‘satanic verses’, which are pulled out of the scripture by the
messenger of Allah immediately afterwards. Along with other aspects that could
be seen as damning or undermining Islamic belief, he would eventually have a fatwā
placed on his head for his death by the late spiritual leader of Iran Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A film like
this, when you review it, would make it difficult for some to hold their
tongues about their religious beliefs or the concept of freedom of speech, but
in hindsight I may have over researched for this review. Rushdie’s novel was exceptional, and it helps to know the book that
caused such an outrage it lead to a murder and attempted assassination
attempts, but International Gorillay
is far from a serious film despite its background and the hatred within it for Rushdie. It was made merely as a
commercial film and the idea of cashing on the controversy as it did makes it a
true exploitation movie. It’s also demented.
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When the Islamic world is terrorised
by the evil Salman Rushdie, a
Bond-like villain in sharp clothes, his own personal army of goons and torture
techniques including forcing the Muslim prisoners to listen to The Satanic Verses in audio book form
in jails, three Muslim men of the same family, after relatives are shot down by
corrupt policemen during an anti-Rushdie protest, go abroad to kill Rushdie for the sake of the Islamic (and
Pakistani) people. When the title credit, in a two and a half hour film,
appears fifty minutes in, you realise International
Gorillay is very different from other films. It’s condemnation of Rushdie, in the countless proclamations
against him to his face, may actually be awkward even for Muslin viewers who
were offended by his novel, and when it’s in the content of a Lollywood film,
where there are musical numbers even during the final confrontation with the
villain, and action scenes that would make Italian genre films like Strike Commando (1987) look like Twilight, and it causes more problems
with the message. Make the film as erratic in the technical side as it is and
in the ideas onscreen as well and your brain turns into the consistency of mash
potato. The version of the film I saw was atrocious, a video rip which had
moments where it seemed the frame had to be fixed like one would see happen by
accident in a cinema, but technically this film is off as well. This is
especially the case in the editing; seconds in the narrative pace seem to be
missing, where it transitions into the next explosion without any establishing
set-up, and a protagonist is suddenly in another place or switches from having
a gun to a crossbow to mow down henchmen. The repetition of footage in-between
ongoing sequences is almost avant garde but it also baffles and undermines how
one puts together images to create a juxtaposition. It’s on the opposite side
of Ninja Terminator (1985), the
first film reviewed in this blog season, in that the placing together of images
in the film actually undermine the concept of editing and scrambles how you a
as a viewer connect images to create a succession of narrative. It is the film
where everyone gets a reaction shot
every time something significant happens, usually with a smash zoom to their
face. It is like a high budgeted version of Turkish Star Wars (1982) with far more action choreography –
explosions, motorbike chases with rockets, helicopters – and even has a
‘rip-off’ aspect by having the protagonists, for no reason, attempt one of
their raids on Rushdie in homemade, Adam West-era Batman costumes.
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International Gorillay and its exploitation cinema mentality
against its reverence with the Islamic religion do not mix very well. It is a
film where Rushdie has in his arsenal
identical versions of himself, musical numbers about the ‘bullet of love’ with
a gun being fired as part of the chorus percussion of one song, and guitar hot
licks from the American, straight-to-video action films made around this time.
This does not gel with the praise of Allah and His Prophet Muhammad at all, as
would happen in a Western film which tried to have this type of tone with a
heavy Christian message, or any
message that is supposed to be taken seriously. The film even has comedy relief
in the form of a bumbling Saudi Arabian sheik and his right hand man who work
with Rushdie and have comic hijinks,
including someone having giant, yellow glasses with miniature windscreen wipers
on them. It doesn’t help though as well that the film is anti-Semitic, with a
Jewish femme fatale with psychic eyes and her brother on Rushdie’s side, adding unnecessary fire to the real life conflict
between Judaism and Islam, within a pulp film. Even something like Turkish Star Wars managed to avoid this,
celebrating the virtues of Islam and Turkish heroes while not trodding on other
religions for cheap effect and going as far as having Christianity part of its
mythology. The ending, which I won’t spoil, is on YouTube, but its moment of divine intervention does not fully
impact you unless you’ve seen the whole feature, seen the musical number
beforehand proclaiming the virtues of Allah and seen it in its proper context. Then
it feels like, regardless of your religious and political beliefs, like you’ve
been struck by lightning yourself.
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The British Board of Film
Classification banned this film from being released in the United Kingdom at
first, but it was Salman Rushdie
himself who persuaded them to change the ruling, under the belief of freedom to
speech even for works negative of him, and because the film was so abstract
from reality that no one would take it seriously. In The Satanic Verses, one of the two protagonists is a megastar of
Bollywood cinema, and while this is a Pakistani film, International Gorillay feels like something Rushdie could have created for the story depending on where the
plot of that book would have went to. Historically, despite the fatwā placed on
his head and protests against his knighthood in the 2000s, Rushdie is an acclaimed author, while I only found out about this
film because of The Satanic Verses controversy,
the only large group who think about this film a great deal being a French
website called Nanarland, which I wish I could read in its French text, who
celebrate ‘bad’ cinema. This review could easily, by accident, become an
insulting and patronising take on Islamic religion, but while the historical
background of Rushdie is important to
get more out of it, International
Gorillay, while trying to give some cathartic entertainment to offended
people, was never meant to be taken seriously and cannot be taken seriously. It’s
entertaining, certainly, but it’s also bizarre, in its own unique world regardless
of its context as a mainstream film from Pakistan. It’ll be impossible to
forget it from all the films I’ve seen from this season.
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| From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/film/international-guerillas/w448/international-guerillas.jpg?1308262039 |
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