BANDIT QUEEN
A film review by Jim Moody
Copyright 1995 Jim Moody
Starring: Seema Biswas, Nirmal Pandey, Manjoj Bajpai Screenplay: Mala Sen Director: Shekhar Kapur Length: 120 minutes English subtitles
Shekhar Kapur's BANDIT QUEEN is a stinging attack on the way low-caste women are regarded and treated in India. From her marriage at age eleven, Phoolan Devi, the main character resists, however. She comes back against her tormentors, learning as best she can in the school of hard knocks.
The real life Phoolan Devi, upon whose dictated story this film is based, has just agreed a claim against the production company; she objected to her depiction on two grounds: showing her character being multiply raped and then her gang taking vengeance on those responsible. But this is not a rape/revenge film in the style of Michael Winner--or anyone else.
Phoolan Devi becomes a bandit, India's nationally notorious Bandit Queen of the title, through a painful succession of rejections. These are pains that Kapur ensures the audience shares, rather than just gaze upon. Her degradation in her parents' village is taken further at the hands of the police, when she is wrongly accused of theft; we are there with her in the prison cell. This experience pales when the higher caste Thakurs who want her to knuckle down to their rule and arrange for her to be kidnapped and tormented further by local bandits (dacoits).
But Phoolan's strength of mind carries her through. A young dacoit, Vikram, who becomes her second lieutenant and her lover, and they lead a band of outlaws. Later, following capture by her Thakur enemies, Phoolan is subjected to multiple rape and even further humiliation. Kapur apparently shut himself up in a small, dark room and tried to imagine himself being raped in order to get his depiction of this scene to express the horror of rape as violence to a woman, rather than the salacious way Hindi films sometimes show it.
Phoolan forms her own gang, becoming notorious throughout the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Audaciously raiding towns one step of the police, the state government launches a massive operation to catch her and her mainly Muslim gang members following a massacre of those Phoolan holds guilty of her multiple rape. Her gang is whittled down in numbers until she has no option but to surrender, which she does in a glare of publicity.
The real Phoolan and her supporters have managed to stop this film being shown in India; the Indian High Court has even tried to stop it being considered for an Oscar. But whether it tells Phoolan Devi's story exactly as it happened or not, the wider truths of BANDIT QUEEN are powerful. Indomitability of the human spirit in deepest adversity, reaction against injustice, and the struggle to keep oneself true are all here in this film. Be seared by it.
BANDIT QUEEN opened in London on Friday 17 February. A US distributor has still to be found.
-- Jim Moody
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews