“I thought you were a diplomat,” Wolverine tells the Beast in the middle of a major dust-up in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). John Abraham fans may do a similar double-take watching Tehran. The actor’s last film, The Diplomat, a political thriller-drama set in Pakistan, was marked by a blessed absence of combat. Tehran too holds its nerve until the one-hour mark, after which there is a shootout in an Abu Dhabi shipyard, and the generic Johnisms threaten to begin.
Tehran—much like Nikkhil Advani’s Batla House (2019) and Shoojit Sircar’s Madras Cafe (2013), all starring Abraham—belongs to a specific strain of Hindi action films: grim, realistic-looking procedurals that spin speculative plots off real-world events. In 2012, in New Delhi, an Israeli diplomat’s car was attacked with a “low-intensity” sticky bomb. Similar bomb plots targeting Israelis were reported in Georgia and Thailand. Israel blamed Iran, suspecting retaliation for killings of Iranian nuclear scientists, a ‘shadow war’ that began in the mid-2000s and is now open in the harsh light of recent events.
As an Indian bureaucrat in the film callously asks, how does this concern us? The investigation in Tehran begins at a local level, with a unit of the police’s Special Cell, led by ACP Rajeev Kumar (Abraham), chasing up leads across a nocturnal Delhi. Rajeev is initially hesitant to take up the job, but something thaws in him: among the bystanders injured was a little girl, about the same age as Rajeev’s daughter. His quest to hunt down the perpetrators thus becomes an exclusively moral mission, a few degrees removed from Eric Bana’s in Spielberg’s Munich (2005).
There is an annoying tendency, in mainstream Hindi films, to invoke world affairs as mere window dressing—in War 2, currently running in theatres, tech-savvy ISIS soldiers join up with Hrithik Roshan’s freelance mercenary to ambush an Indian chartered plane. Tehran swerves in a different direction. Indeed, the film’s most fascinating aspect is its politics, director Arun Gopalan and writers Ritesh Shah, Bindi Karia and Ashish Prakash Varma making gestures towards pragmatism and even-handedness. India, we are told in plain terms, relies on both Israel and Iran—to intervene would be incautious and against the nation’s fiscal and strategic interests. The film also does not sidestep the topic of Palestine (even if the pathos comes wrapped in moral equivocation).
There are some neat directorial touches, like the casting of filmmaker Qaushiq Mukherjee as the shifty-looking intelligence chief. Cinematographers Evgeniy Gubrenko and Andre Menezes dial up the blacks and browns; the dank and dingy rooms of the Special Cell recall the crummy basement office in The Wire. Abraham, over 50 films in, has staked his claim as the great stoic of Indian acting; these days, characters like Rajeev just fit him like a glove.
Unlike so many thrillers and war films, Tehran does not bring up ‘collateral damage’ lightly. Time and again, the action pauses to take in a moment of loss and grief. In his sombre yet steadfast way, Gopalan tallies up the human cost of conflict. Even a high-speed car chase, near the climax, is soundtracked with the mournful ‘hasraton ke bazaar’. Something sad and sepulchral tugs at this film, one that celebrates dauntless Indian exceptionalism.