Cast: Kirti Kulhari, Tota Roychowdhury, Anupam Kher, Neil Nitin Mukesh, Supriya Vinod
Director: Madhur Bhandarkar
Rating: 2 stars (out of 5)
What kind of a biopic will they make about you? Will you live a life that merits an inspirational picture with rabble-rousing lines and a background score that swells with pride? Or will it be a slacker picture, loose and free-flowing and not saying much? Will you live a life so groundbreaking that it will have to be told with nuance and cunning and an Oscar-nominated performance in the centre? Or will it be a family picture that pleases without breaking the mould? Will you live a life worthy of the attention of a master storyteller or, well, not?
Indu Sarkar Movie Review: Supriya Vinod and Neil Nitin Mukesh in a film still
Set around the Emergency, Indu Sarkar happens instead to be the story of a woman of that name - as opposed to a woman whose government might as well well have operated under her name - who is a timid, stammering poet who has been through a life of hard knocks. As an orphan up for adoption, prospective parents would routinely walk away from little Indu while she was talking, dismissing her stammer mid-sentence. Then, as potential bridegrooms began to up and leave, one of them stayed, an odd Bengali gent who, on a dinner date, waved away food while saying things like "I'm not hungry, but I know what hunger is."
Indu Sarkar Movie Review: A still from the film
This is a peculiar film. It is a film where a dialect coach hears the girl recite several lines of Hindi poetry and then says, "Good, now say 'Anaesthesia.'" A film where a blind man at a barbershop makes a Kishore Kumar joke and the saloon breaks into song. A film where people at a party talking about yes-men don't stop nodding at every word in a sentence lest anyone forget how servile they are. A film where Sanjay Gandhi's meetings with his cronies are presented like tight-lipped Gabbar Singh sequences, and capped off by a sudden qawwali performance where the singer points to Sanjay - referred to merely as Chief in this film - and sings of his downfall.
Oh dear.
Nothing is quite as it seems.
Indu Sarkar starts off with brutal scenes of the forced sterilisation drive, one of Sanjay's most catastrophically cockamamie schemes, but here's something striking: before the cops arrive to cart the men off to the shears, people are dancing to a film song. This, I decided, can be no coincidence, dancing to a Bobby song before being nearly bobbited, and - coupled with the caricatured acting, straight out of Jaspal Bhatti's Flop Show, all bombast and exaggeration - I began to think Mr Bhandarkar has pulled the wool over our eyes and actually made an audacious farce, a full-throated absurdist satire. (Spoiler alert: he has not, and the film is merely and disappointingly bad.)
Indu Sarkar Movie Review: A still from the film
Indu Sarkar demonstrates that it doesn't matter who is in charge if the thinking is oppressive. It serves also as potent warning to those in power now and in the future, threatening their legacies. Behave yourselves or else Madhur Bhandarkar will make a film about you.
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