Cast: Hugh Bonneville, Gillian Anderson, Manish Dayal, Huma Qureshi, Michael Gambon
Director: Gurinder Chadha
Ratings: 2 Stars (Out Of 5)
The affair between Lord Louis Mountbatten's valet Jeet Kumar (Manish Dayal) and Aalia Noor (Huma Qureshi), an assistant to the Viceroy's daughter Pamela (Lily Travers), generates neither passion nor pathos. Ditto in the case of Partition: 1947 (the dubbed Hindi version of Viceroy's House, released in Europe in March) as a whole. The film is meant to drive home the enormity of the tragedy that was the Partition as well as highlight the culpability of the British Empire in shoving the subcontinent into a hate-filled cauldron. It does neither with any felicity.
Chadha's period re-enactment focuses as much on the exalted representatives of the Empire as on their liveried servants as the two groups, each in its own way and at its own level, negotiate the challenges that stem from the plan to carve up the subcontinent into two new religion-based nations.
When the Radcliffe Line tears Jeet and Aalia apart and compels them to go their own ways, the separation of the secret lovers arouses no emotion at all. That is the kind of film Partition: 1947 is - it deals with momentous and disturbing events, but is unable to draw the audience fully into the flow of its drama.
Here, the sheer vastness and complexity of the subject compel her to scale up her cinematic ambitions, seek dividends in grand scenes in which the likes of Mountbatten, Lord Islay (Michael Gambon) and Sir Cyril Radcliffe (Simon Callow) discuss the spoils of independence with Mahatma Gandhi (Neeraj Kabi), Jawaharlal Nehru (Tanveer Ghani) and Muhammad Ali Jinnah (Denzil Smith), and eventually falls well short of achieving the heft that a historical saga of this nature demands.
Chadha tells the Partition story in a monotonous arc. Confined largely to high-level inner chamber parleys and happenings in and around the outhouses, the tale steers clear of the actual hurly-burly of the freedom struggle and the communal violence unleashed by the largest human migration in history. The cataclysmic developments are alluded to in lines of dialogue and in grainy archival footage, which, too, rarely feel anything but stilted and self-conscious in the manner that they are put to use.
Drawing upon a couple of books, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre's Freedom at Midnight and Narendra Singh Sarila's The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India's Partition as well as bits of her own family history - pertaining to a grandmother who went missing during the Partition riots, lost a daughter to starvation, and was found a few days later in a refugee camp and reunited with her family - and a whole lot of fiction to piece together the developments of mid- 1947.
Male lead Hugh Bonneville bears no resemblance whatever to Lord Mountbatten but the Downton Abbey star is an accomplished enough actor not to let the physical unlikeness come in the way of his interpretation of the historical figure. Gillian Anderson as Lady Edwina Mountbatten has to carry the burden of far too many cheesy lines. "You are ushering in the future," she tells her husband in one scene; in another, addressing the staff of Viceroy's House, she declares: "We are poised at a very important point of history". It isn't easy shaking off the deleterious effects of that sort of forced cloying 'clairvoyance'.
As for Manish Dayal and Huma Qureshi, the duo is stuck in poorly envisioned roles that pan out more in the manner of parts devised for mainstream movie love stories that thrive on coincidences and contrivances - chance meeting, separation, reunion, separation again, fortuitous reunion one more time. The pattern is all too familiar. The performances are par for the course.
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