Change Your Image
hkpt
Reviews
An Ordinary Man (2017)
Boring !
Real waste of time.
This is a surreal art movie produced by Kingsley for self gratification. Movie was deliberately dragged to 2 hours by following Kingsley continuously on an average day.
Indu Sarkar (2017)
Good Work, But Cliched
Bollywood, since the making of Lagaan around 2001, has found that drawing plots for history is the best way to juice up drama for the audiences. After all, the stories of real life heros and villians have more power to excite our neurons than fictitious heroes like Bond or fictitious villains like Gabbar Singh.
However, recreating history is fraught with the challenge of retaining the accuracy of its most popular version. You can not take controversial figures like Tipu Sultan and Aurangazeb and turn them into unidimensional personalities, sans their colors. Nor can you whitewash a "Sanju" into a hapless child lost in the web of circumstances. (We are waiting for "Bhai" biopic on why a lost soul started killing deer or homeless people sleeping on the pavement).
It is one thing to portray a historical figure like Shivaji, Akbar or an Arjunu - for no one saw these people, nor lived in their times. So, the storyteller and director can apply all tricks in their creative arsenal to reconstruct what Shivaji or Akbar looked like. In the end, the finished product is a colorful painting, whose "truthiness", but not its truth is relevant for the consumers.
What about works of fiction intending to portray recent historical events and personalities - say, the partition of India, the period of Emergency, or the life of Indira Gandhi, NT Rama Rao, Savitri, or Jayalalita, or the Naxal movement in West Bengal? I'd say, this is the most challenging task. The events and people are not to be imagined, since there are many living people in whose minds the memories of those events and personalities are still fresh. Errors or ommissions and commisions will not be taken in movies like these - since the people who knew the events and protagonists will not take them lightly.
So, for a movie that purports to portray the Emergency, it is not sufficient to include jingles about Khaitan pankhas, songs from Bobby and wall posters of Sholay and a general air of 'dust' to recall the Delhi of the 70's era, but the movie could have stayed closer to its primary subject. While, examining the grossness of Emergency through the eyes of Indu Sarkar is a useful plot device, the life of Indu Sarkar is deliberately concocted to give her the likeness of a 'Sita Devi' in Ramayana. She is a failure at every turn before she become a war heroine of Emergency - orphan, stammers, can not get a job. One has to ask what value her stammering added to the plot, unless Madhur is personally aware of such a real person. A wig that covers a half of her face all the time seems like a costume failure for a 'good wife'.
There are many turns and twists in the plot that challenge common sense of the viewers: why do traditional middle class moms go to orphanages to find their prospective bahu's? In what family backdrop has Naveen Sarkar decided to marry an orphan? If he has ideals high enough to marry an orphan, why did he sell his soul to the dictats of Emergency? Since Indu knows about orphanages, why could she not find a place for the children in an orphanage? In only Sodhi could have disclosed his plan to adopt the kids, Indu and Navin could have lived their lives as normal as ever. And the execution of Navin by the director is possibly an emotional gut wrencher bonus for the audience with no purpose.
Like many movies in the contemporary genre, the movie has uncontextual feministic jabs at the lives of Indian women and gives Indu opportunities to rise above the despair that was supposed to be an Indian woman. Movie employs the 'small world cliche' through out; Indu, Navin, his female municipal chief, Sodhi must run into each other all the time. (Indu could have found a job reasonably far from from her husband's office, you would think).
The biggest joke and slap in the face of the audiences are the statutory warnings about the story being fictional and end the movie with statistics from the Shah commission report. The best part, for those of use who have not seen Sanjay Gandhi first hand, is his excellent portrayal by Neil Nitin. Indu, Navin and Jagdish Tytler acted their parts very well too.
For someone who was a high schooler at the time of emergency and lived the times of Indira/Sanjay Gandhis, the atrocities of emergency and the hijack of the Indian democracy are vivid in my mind. I liked the movie for reconstructing this part of history for people born much later. However, somewhere the movie veered off from the main course, became the personal life of Indu Sarkar, who is an invention of Madhur Bhandarkar. He would have done better by also touching on how Emergency ended with the election of some of the most stellar leaders of India through the formation of the Janata Party - second only to the original constituent assembly. It is very doubtful if India will ever duplicate the cast of political leaders in the 1977 lok sabha elections - the last living member off which was Sri Atal Bihari Vajpayee.