The trailer for Meghana Gulzar’s Raazi dropped today morning and some of us sat there with a sense of deja vu. As Alia Bhatt went about her spy training clad in a salwar kameez (she presumably plays a Kashmiri character), we couldn’t help but ‘spy’ some shades of Preity Zinta in her. Remember Reshma from Anil Sharma’s super-jingoistic Hero: Love Story Of A Spy (2003)?
For the uninitiated, the film sees a RAW agent (played by Sunny Deol) mixing business and pleasure, as he ‘recruits’ his love-interest (played by Preity Zinta) to cross the border and work as a domestic help in the house of a Colonel of the Pakistani Army. Of course she risks her life, out of her ‘admiration’ and ‘respect’ for Sunny Deol’s character, after he helps her resume her education. #WhattaPlaya #NotManipulativeAtAll
Alia Bhatt doesn’t seem to subscribe to Preity Zinta’s wardrobe choices of MASSIVE earrings, and deliberate coyness to drive home the character’s background of being from a small town. Instead, her idea of playing a local is (thankfully) more subtle.
And even though, the Anil Sharma film cut-short Preity Zinta’s spy track by ‘safely’ bringing her back home (thanks to some dhai-kilo-ka-haath intervention by Sunny Deol), the Alia Bhatt-starrer seems to maintain its focus on the spy, stuck behind enemy lines. She’s even shown doing ‘cool spy stuff’ like sending transmissions in Morse code and pointing a gun. Whereas, the bravest thing Zinta’s character did was climb up a tree and scream while sliding down a beautiful set built on water.
Jokes apart, Raazi’s trailer left me with a severe Hero: Love Story Of a Spy hangover. As it releases in a month’s time, it will be interesting to see if the film supersedes the Sunny Deol-starrer into being a far more taut film. Even though the director seems to be in good form after Talvar, but it’s important to remember that a certain Vishal Bhardwaj had something to do with that film. The screenplay credit for Raazi, is shared between Bhavani Iyer and the director herself. We’ll have to find out on May 11.
You can watch the Raazi trailer here:
