My awareness of suicide bombers came slowly. Once it was grossly wrong. I can barely trace its origins. Conrad's Secret Agent? The myth of the eager kamikaze pilot? Self-immolating monks during the Vietnam War? Joan of Arc retracting her recantation? Those last two political in effect but without collateral damage. Maybe because the rest of us associate suicide with despair or even illness, because we imagine it a solitary act preventable by just the right word from a hotline phone operative, I imagined that suicide bombers in the Middle East and elsewhere acted spontaneously and alone. As if the first and only decision could come seconds before boarding the target bus. As if explosives grew under rocks and leaves. Reading the headlines I'd perceive anger, despair, courage, but miss entirely that someone, someone probably with no intention joining in the self-sacrifice, had to provide not just explosives, but training in their use, and that along with that had to come if not coercion then at least persuasion, cajoling, indoctrination.
Much of Santosh Sivan's The Terrorist takes place in a forest as lush as any Miyazaki's ever penned. Malli's journey to her VIP target is a fairytale journey. She's a hero. Her sure-to-survive-her mentor purrs "You're supreme: A thinking bomb." We say that now about tech, about robotics, but in this context it's magic. Young boys, knowing, gape in awe of her. Flashbacks to her brother's and to another's deaths imply that she was born a terrorist so can't possibly feel or deserve blame, and that her people's war is mystic, without beginning or end. In flashback, she discovers beside a river a hand attached to a body apparently dead, but that soon murmurs something "books" and then "You're a girl!" He's never seen one so close. Gnome-like ferry guide, Surya: "In the forest every tree, bird, leaf is known to me," but both continuing and marring the magic: "I know here every mine is." When an enemy patrol truck hits a mine he hides his eyes: "We must go another way. There will be blood and flesh everywhere." When Malli kills, he's distraught, disillusioned. Malli's less squeamish, yet her eyes, like Surya's, never rest, never stop watching. In the dark river flashbacks there's a side shot so near her pupil and iris form a huge reflective orb.
Once she arrives, housed with the philosophy spouting oldster and his comatose wife in a settlement that seems barely maintained against the forest, the terror-bound watchfulness, self-protection, and determination in those huge eyes of hers morphs just slightly toward curiosity. With soldier-like spontaneity, she reports to her new mentor the old man's questions, but backs off at the suggestion he's a threat. She's changed from battle wear to saris, does chores, accepts the old man's friendliness. When he hints that he knows her mission, she opts, probably against her training, to protect him.
When she hesitates at assassination rehearsal, the coach prods "Don't think! Don't think!" The phrase may damn him in the minds of some viewers, especially us Westerners, but how different is it from Douglas Adams's sarcastic but supremely reassuring "Don't panic!"?
In the final scene, while she hesitates, flower petals waft across her hand. There the film ends. We don't know what she does, what happens. In reality, she's hesitates so long, the trigger is so exposed, that she might be trapped, might have appeared suspicious. The thing could go off accidentally or by intent as they rush her. But no matter. The film has ended. There is no beyond: only a loop back to film's beginning. All was artifice, myth, hero journey.
I really hesitate, lest I offend about this film's very serious and timely subject. But just as the near magic lethal forest here suggests Miyazaki, Malli has no little in common with San, the wolf princess, Mononoke, in Miyazaki's Mononoke Hime.
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