Director: Shekhar Kapur; Writer: Mala Sen from her biography; Producer: Ka-lei-doscope (India), Channel Four Films (London), Sundeep Singh Bedi; Cinematographer: Ashok Mehta, Giles Nuttgens; Editor: Renu Saluja; Cast: Seema Biswas, Nirmal Pandey, Manoj Bajpai, Rajesh Vivek, Govind Namdeo, Saurabh Shukla, Raghuvir Yadav, Sunita Bhatt
Duration: 01:54:57; Aspect Ratio: 1.731:1; Hue: 10.202; Saturation: 0.077; Lightness: 0.304; Volume: 0.105; Cuts per Minute: 16.979; Words per Minute: 25.686
Summary: The harrowing although in the end heroic story
of Phoolan Devi, previously filmed in the form
of a Hindi musical (Phoolan Devi, 1984), is
represented by Kapur in an intensely emotional
movie drawing on a wide variety of generic
elements ranging from socialist realist
posturing via action movies to lyrical and, at
crucial moments, impressively reserved and
elliptical scenes more commonly associated
with the art cinema. The story starts with the
young village girl (Bhatt), still a child, being
sold by her impoverished parents as a bride.
The ensuing rape of the child on her ‘wedding
day’, conveyed by an agonised scream, sets the
tone for much of what follows. The heroine
(Biswas) grows up under a regime of caste
banditry and terrorism, exercised mainly by the
local thakurs, backed up by police terrorism,
both involving the most brutish forms of sexual
terrorism as one gang rape (by the police who
arrested her for running away from a childmolesting
husband) is followed by another
perpetrated by the thakurs which lasts for three
days and is conveyed by way of a relentlessly
opening barn door as the upper-caste villains
file in, including a symbolic rape by an entire
village community who force her to strip naked
in the village square. However, instead of
allowing her cold fury to destroy herself, the
heroine teams up with an outlaw gang and
wreaks bloody revenge on her persecutors.
Chased by the police, she evades capture long
enough for the news of her exploits and ordeal
to spark a nationwide interest in her fate,
making it difficult for the local representatives
of power simply to kill her off. Political
expediency requires the government to
negotiate with her and she eventually
surrenders at a public ceremony to which
masses of people flocked from far and wide.
She is applauded by the assembled people,
suggesting her rebellion found a deep echo in
a population exploited and terrorised by the
politically powerful thakur caste in that region.
Predictably, the film became controversial, a
phenomenon acquiring additional complexity
when Phoolan Devi, released, remarried and
harbouring political ambitions but still liable to
prosecution for murder should the authorities
decide to press the matter, repudiated the film.
The newcomer Seema Biswas gives a
performance of great intensity and conviction
in the lead role.
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