May 17, 2017 12:55 AM
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Hello everyone I m sachin yadav and here is a little summary of this movie. The story of the bloody birth of India and Pakistan is so inherently full of drama that any telling of any part of it needs a great deal of skilled restraint.That crucial thing is thrown to the winds in ‘Begum Jaan’, based on ‘Rajkahini’, Srijit Mukherji’s Bangla film. I haven’t seen the original, but this, meant to be a faithful remake, climbs to a high-pitched melodramatic perch, and progresses in episodic lurches, never coming down.
Which is a pity because ‘Begum Jaan’ could have been an impactful drama full of memorable characters, led by its leading lady, Vidya Balan. Dressed in flowing robes, eyes lined with kohl, puffing on a hookah, lording it over her ladies, pardon the pun, Balan plays a madam who runs a brothel, slam bang in the midst of all the action.
In the tumultuous days that lead up to the Partition, the location of the ‘kotha’ becomes an ironic inflection point: the house where women sell their flesh without checking religion and caste is about to be divided, the line drawn by the British cleaving it down the middle.
Elsewhere in the film, two officers – Hari Prasad Srivastav(Ashish Vidyarthi) and Ilias(Rajit Kapoor), from India and Pakistan, in charge of executing the Radcliff Line – meet each other after a long time. They’re friends whose families have been ravaged by the communal riots. This scene, too, held some promise, but Mukherji ruins the set-up, for he films it in a wide-shot with the two men at the extreme ends of the frame, with exactly half their faces visible. Mukherji keeps alternating between the actors’ solo shots and them being in the same frame, needlessly distracting us, drawing attention to craft. He also probably believes this style is rather inventive, for he repeats it later in the film, in a different scene with the same actors.(And no, the probable intent – of a partitioned face, a part of a whole, in a film centred on Partition – isn’t lost on us; it is, in fact, painfully obvious.)
Begum Jaan, especially in its second half, moves quickly from passable to forgettable, for it doesn’t have a meaty story to tell. There’s a fair amount of narrative padding – an old women in the brothel recounts the tales of famous Indian women(the Rani of Jhansi, Radha, Razia Sultan) to a young girl – that burdens the film with unnecessary flashbacks. Begum Jaan is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get drama, but it just doesn’t have enough to hold our attention, intrigue us further. At times, the characters slip into schmaltzy quasi-monologues, tuning us out; certain scenes are repeated for dramatic effect; the acting, too, is quite uneven.
Begum Jaan is the story of a bunch of women who have nothing to lose, but they fight tooth and nail for everything that they have. If only they were allowed a few quieter moments in the course of their struggle to defend their hard-earned freedom from a society that they have been brutalized by, the story might have attained the heights of an Ismat Chughtai short story.
