Director: Ketan Mehta; Writer: Hriday Lani, Tripurari Sharma; Producer: NFDC; Cinematographer: Jehangir Choudhury; Editor: Sanjiv Shah; Cast: Naseeruddin Shah, Smita Patil, Om Puri, Suresh Oberoi, Deepti Naval, Benjamin Gilani, Raj Babbar, Mohan Gokhale, Supriya Pathak, Dina Pathak, Ratna Pathak, Ram Gopal
Duration: 01:58:02; Aspect Ratio: 1.423:1; Hue: 33.297; Saturation: 0.184; Lightness: 0.359; Volume: 0.230; Cuts per Minute: 13.758; Words per Minute: 31.463
Summary: Following its commercial release in New York
this became Mehta’s best-known film outside
India. Intended as an allegory of colonial
oppression but presented as a sex-and-violence
drama, the film is set in pre-Independence
Saurashtra. The despotic tax collector Subedar
(Shah), dressed in a way that evokes British
19th C. catchpenny prints and Daumier’s
cartoons, imposes his rule on a village. All the
villagers try to satisfy his every whim, except
for the protesting schoolteacher (Gilani). The
drama starts when the beautiful Sonbai (Patil)
is to be surrendered to the lecherous Subedar.
She takes refuge in the courtyard of a spice
factory run entirely by women and is protected
by an aged watchman (Om Puri) who closes
the gates to Subedar’s men. Although made in
Hindi, the film draws on Gujarati verbal and
performative idioms. Mehta explicitly deployed
stock literary melodrama characters, but these
cliches from contemporary popular culture lack
the historical resonance achieved by the more
complex figures Mehta used in his
extraordinary Bhavni Bhavai (1980).
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