Bose, the forgotten hero
 

Why is Mr. Shyam Benegal so upset about the poor promotion of his film? Good that it has been poorly promoted. Good that very few people will watch it and thus avoid going through a harrowing, demeaning, and revolting experience. It pulls down the personality of the forgotten hero to the level of bad actors from theatre and films. It is a callous and careless treatment of a grand subject. Bose, the forgotten hero, slights the memory of the great patriot.

Yet, Benegal is unhappy for no reason. He has made his money which was the cause he set about to serve. He should not be cribbing. He says 23 crores INR were spent on the movie. Where did he spend all this money? Sahara Motion Pictures has certainly been taken for a ride, just like they  have been  fooling their poor investors  to fund their pompous publicity stunts. Chor Chor Mausere Bhai.

Subhash Chandra Bose is an icon that could not be erased from the collective consciousness of the people of India in spite of the indifferent treatment meted out to his persona and work by the political-cultural-historical establishment largely dominated by the Communists and those who were close to the Nehru-Gandhi khandaan. It was done with  a deliberate design. However, Bose remained a larger than life figure  for the people of India. The black and white documentary images of Bose would cast a spell on us. The marching soldiers of Indian National Army (INA), singing 'Kadam kadam badhaye ja, khushi ke geet gaye ja, ye zindagi hai kaum ki, kuam pe lutaye ja', carrying posters of Bose on their backs, would bring tears to our eyes and our chests would swell with patriotic pride and fervour. 'Tum mujhe khoon do, main tumhe aazadi doonga' -- even today these immortalised words get our adrenalin pumping.

Bose's story is one of the most fascinating chronicles of our freedom struggle that has been turned into an undistinguished film by a sham filmmaker. Why did Benegal do it? His treatment of Bose and his legacy is so pathetic. It is even worse than the way he treated the stories of singing tawaifs, prostitutes, and a Maharaja's nubile mistress.

What was Benegal's objective in making this film?

1. Was it an attempt at putting certain records straight?
2. Was he trying to capture the spirit of those times on celluloid?
3. Was he trying to explore some hidden sides of Bose?
4. Was he trying to test his mettle as a war filmmaker?
5. Was it a tribute to and an expression of his love for the hero and his work? Or
6. Was it to make hay while the sun of Sahara shone on him?

He sacrificed the first five opportunities and made hay as sun shone and what we got in the bargain was a haystack of a film. It is an abominably written, directed, and enacted film. It is anecdotal* in content, and shoddy in its execution. In the name of exploring the hidden side of Bose's life, it almost turns his supposedly romantic dalliances with his stenographer into the central theme of the film. Suppose, Attenborough tried to explore Gandhi's experiments with  'sleeping naked with young girls' truth in his film, what would have been its fate? Moreover, these romantic scenes have come out very badly thanks to the poor direction, the bad scripting, and the sub-standard performances by the actors. Benegal has also made it a point to show that Bose was a drinker. What was the need? Imagine what would have happened to Attenborough’s Gandhi had it shown the great man drinking his own urine, as his ‘swamootra chikitsa’ routine, in the name of discovering hidden facets of Gandhi’s persona.

Its war scenes are comical, badly shot, and repetitive. They fail to depict the hell the INA soldiers had to go through. Bose is surrounded by a whole lot of comedians who devour greater footage than him. There are times when you feel that the actors are competing to hog the limelight by outdoing Sachin Khedekar, who plays Bose. Rajat Kapoor as Abid is downright condescending and cavaliertowards his supreme commander. Rajeshwari Sachdev, who plays Captain Laxmi, almost rebukes Bose in one of the scenes. Khedekar has not done any homework. He is always in a speech-making mode and delivers his lines at the same pitch. He is too loud and thus undignified. He has failed to essay and explore the nuances of Bose’s role. Moreover, all the actors seem to be doing their own things. The white actors in the film look like jokers, Hitler in particular. They are actually roadside extras. These are all obvious flaws. You need not be a student of cinema to discover them. The director seems to have no control over his actors here. It is unheard of in the realm of cinema. A producer and a star taking over the reins of a film project from the director is a rampant problem but ordinary struggling actors doing something like this is an astounding revelation.

Bose, the forgotten hero, fails to capture the heady spirit of the times. This should have been the real challenge and probably the most satisfying directorial experience for Benegal. He had so much of exciting visual references available to him. He just had to recreate some of the scenes and shots from the original documentary footage. It wouldn't have cost him much but a bit of imagination and a careful and joint research and study of the available material with his DOP, art director, writers, and actors combined with some painstaking execution of shots. He did not take the trouble though. We have a whole lot of films made on INA related subjects in the past. They were far better films than this 23 crores magnum opus of a bogus filmmaker.
 

 The script also dwells on the non-essentials in preference to the essential. It is a perennial problem with Benegal's coterie of writers. They burden the screenplay with their obscure and stupid personal POVs. They lack a sense of balance and integrity. Their narration is disjointed and its pace is determined by what the writers feel is a smart-alecky thing to do. You don't make biopics of historical figures in this manner. If you do, you lose the audience as well as denigrate the subject of your film. You have to build on the dramatic moments. Benegal has not done it. We have heard that the shows of Bose had to be cancelled in some cinema halls because none turned up to watch the film. You cannot blame the poor promotion of the film for this. The filmmaker should be blamed. He has made a film that cannot even generate a ‘word-of-mouth’ sympathy and support for itself.

I feel that Bose should not have been released. It should have stayed where it belonged. In dibbas, in some obscure dirty corner of a film lab. Instead, we should join all the available documentary footage on Bose and show it in our schools and colleges to let kids know that a giant like him once walked this land.

 * Why is Bose an anecdotal film? Because, it is an unwholesome mixture of commonplace anecdotes from the life of a great man.

MS