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What Sicario is able to achieve that Talvar couldn't

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Karan Singh Tyagi
Karan Singh TyagiOct 16, 2015 | 21:39

What Sicario is able to achieve that Talvar couldn't

Denis Villeneuve’s visceral drug-war drama Sicario is a brilliant multi-layered philosophical reflection of our world. It unmasks the crises of values in which our democracies find themselves today. Having come under assault by violent forces like terrorism, our democracies explicitly, and we, implicitly, by silent condonation, have responded with war and new forms of torture and surveillance.

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Poster of Sicario

Sicario is set against the backdrop of one of these wars — a border war between the drug cartels in Mexico. It tells the tale of Emily Blunt (Kate), a principled FBI agent ushered into a world of off-the-books policing led by Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) and Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro).

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Kate is a firm believer in the rule of law, but she finds herself in a squad that routinely makes illegal crossings into Mexico and employs extremely coercive forms of interrogation procedures.The approach of the squad gradually chews at Kate’s moral fibre.

The movie is Kate’s journey of becoming aware of the widespread institutional meltdown in which law and anarchy, patriotism and terrorism, are becoming more and more difficult to tell apart. A realisation of this disintegrating world wrecks her soul - an emotional death that is beautifully captured in the haunting last scene.

Sicario weaves a web of moral dilemmas between the rule of law Kate believes in, against the morally and legally questionable but effective course of action employed by the squad.Explorations of these moral dilemmas in movies is not new. The Dark Knight, a vastly different movie from Sicario, questions the post-9/11 security and surveillance apparatus.

Slavoj Zizek provided an interesting lens through which to interpret Dark Knight’s message - we are a society that needs to resort to a bunch of "lies" to maintain our perception of justice.

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Emily Blunt plays Kate Macer, an upright FBI official in Sicario

Sicario ventures into the haunted space of political and psychological terror by concerning itself with the discovery of that "lie".

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The moral conundrum at the heart of Sicario stands in sharp contrast with Meghna Gulzar's recent Talvar. While Talvar is rightfully contemptuous of the investigation carried out by the UP police team, it does not cast the same level of moral scrutiny on Irrfan Khan's actions - forced narco-analysis tests (which are a violation of the right to privacy) and interrogational torture.

The initial general response to the movie reflects our tendency to instantly cling to binary codes of good and evil.One can argue that Irrfan Khan's methods led to the actual culprits being caught, but that doesn't retroactively justify his actions. It doesn't make his moral and legal transgressions "right". It makes them efficient - but are these actions justifiable in the name of the greater good?

Talvar, while being a great movie on many levels, trades these complex moral questions for partisanship.

What makes Sicario such a compelling movie - particularly in contrast to Talvar - is the extent to which the makers were intent on maintaining the film's moral complexity. The movie expertly brings out the crookedness of our morality and the greyness of our constitutional positions - a perfect depiction of our vulnerable and compromised humanity.

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Last updated: October 16, 2015 | 21:39
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