Hotel Dhaka

Hotel Dhaka: My quick take on “Faraaz” (Netflix)

Hansal Mehta is known to make hard-hitting movies that are generally anti-establishment. This national award-winning director has given us movies like Shahid, Omerta, and Citylights, and series like “Scam”. This time he picked up a script based on a real story of a terror attack that took place in a cafe in Dhaka.

He did a good job in setting up the plot in Dhaka (not sure if it was shot in Dhaka), and the overall feel of every frame looked authentic and convincing. Even the cast is hand-picked (except Juhi Babbar, I could not identify anybody). However I felt, that had the main language of the movie been Bengali instead of chaste Hindi, it would have raised the quality of the movie a few notches up. Remember the Aussi-Indian production “Hotel Mumbai”, it was an English movie but the main language of the movie was Hindi.

Plot hovers around a character called Nibras ( played by Aditya Paresh Rawal) he is the lead terrorist who raids a cafe and takes customers as hostages. Among the hostages, there is Faraaz, the son of a local business magnate who is with his friends. This character of Faraz is played by Zahaan Kapoor (grandson of Shashi Kapoor). Though the movie is titled after this character, ironically he has very less screen time and whatever screen time he bagged, he fails to impress. On the other hand, Nibras is very convincing (after all he is a chip of “Paresh” block).

This hostage drama ends up with the cleaning up of all terrorists by elite forces. However, the movie fails to leave a lasting impression as a hard-hitting hostage drama. Hansal Mehta should have to taken a leaf or two from Hotel Mumbai.

The movie is available on Netflix now, just in case you want to revisit the dark pages of this ‘human tragedy’ you can watch it.