Director: Nana Patekar; Writer: Hriday Lani, Nana Patekar, Sujit Sen; Producer: Deepak Bhingardive, Sudhakar Bokade; Cinematographer: Debu Deodhar; Editor: Afaque Husain; Cast: Makrand Deshpande, Madhuri Dixit, Gautam Joglekar, Dimple Kapadia, Jahangir Khan, Nana Patekar, Achyut Potdar, Vishwajeet Pradhan, Adesh Shrivastava, Shivkumar Subramaniam, Habib Tanvir
Summary: Patekar’s weirdly fascist fantasy of a military
Pied Piper followed by naked boys about to be
transformed into a glorious army of bullies
which will sort out the mess created by
‘emasculated’ people in the real world. The first
half of the film lovingly portrays a dictatorial
Major Chouhan (Patekar himself) subjecting the
youthful male bodies to some gruelling tests.
We learn that the major’s Messianism is rooted
in a tragic childhood: his mother was sold as a
prostitute and he spends the rest of his life
compensating for the helplessness he felt then.
When one of the major’s wards is killed by
gangsters extracting protection money from his
father, the local baker, Patekar confronts the
thugs, but the ordinary folk in the area do not
understand the need for drastic action and the
hero is forced to massacre the villains in the
dead of night, watched only by the widow of
one of their former victims. The climax is, in
the light of subsequent events in Bombay, a
chillingly deliberate orgy of violence. The
ensuing court case sentences Patekar to a
lunatic asylum, where he fantasises about his
naked, pubescent army.
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