E-Mail This Article to a Friend THE WARRIOR

Those looking for war in Asif Kapadia’s The Warrior will be disappointed. The swordsman of the title, Lafcadia (Irfan Khan), is more an enforcer than a warrior, the muscle man for a feudal lord, cutting off the odd head or two from tardy taxpayers or applying the torch to a wayward village. During the latter operation, a chance encounter between his sword and the neck of a young peasant girl drives him into a midlife crisis. He tosses away his sword, cuts his hair, and tries to flee to his home village in the Himalaya with his son. The lord, though, doesn’t accept his resignation: Lafcadia’s son is slain, and his flight leaves a swath of death at the hands of the pursuing remaining warriors. Yet there’s scarcely a stroke of violence or a word of dialogue. It would be nice to say that Kapadia’s picturesque parable draws on ancient myth, or universal archetypes, but the people and places the repentant warrior meets on his path to peace seem more along the lines of pop psychology and Hollywood clichés.