Draupadi Unleashed

The lot of a woman in India has long been sadness.

(2019) Romance (Passion River) Salena Qureshi, Cas Anvar, Taaha Shah Badusha, Dominic Rains, Anna George, Melanie Chandra, Azita Ghanizada, Paras Patel, Saad Siddiqui, Indigo Sabharwal, Abi Bais, Gopal Divan, Anil Kumar, Meghana Mudiyam, Pooja Batra, Kai Gowda, TeriEnna Blanco. Directed by Tony Stopperan and Nisha Sabharwal

 

Passion can be a liberating thing, but it can also be a damning thing. Our passions can lead us into great happiness, but more often, into big trouble. But passion is an indelible part of our nature, like it or not.

Young Indira (Qureshi) has passion to spare, but you’d never know it. For one thing, female passion is frowned upon during the British raj of the 1930s, and certainly in the upper caste to which she belongs. She is expected to be submissive to her husband – when a marriage is arranged for her – and to let him do all the thinking. Her job is to keep his house and make him happy.

But Indira wants more, and more might be her cousin Gautam (Badusha), her childhood playmate grown to handsome young manhood. However, the match arranged for her is with Amar (Rains), the heir to a sugar fortune, but another cousin of Indira, Masumi (Ghanizada) – who happens to be married to the rarely present Dev (Saddiqui) – has designs on Amar. She approves the match, if only so that Indira can turn down his sexual advances so that he is driven to Masumi. Blessing the union of Amar and Indira is the reclusive swami Manu (Anvar) who instantly realizes what’s going on and tries to steer this ship away from the rocks it is heading to, but the tremors that begin to occur with more frequency presage a disaster coming to the city of Quetta that would eventually kill more than 40,000.

I will say this is a lush and beautiful looking and sounding film; the visuals have that Downton Abby sheen of wealth and privilege, while the score – utilizing traditional Indian instruments and melodies – is absolutely breathtaking.

The movie exists in kind of a bubble; the social upheaval going on in India during the same period is never referred to – they may as well have set the action on Mars. There is a curiously bloodless feeling here, as if everyone is on lithium. From time to time, someone (usually Amar) raises their voice, but for someone who is willing to run off with her cousin, Indira sometimes comes off as someone who really can’t be bothered to make a decision on her own. The effect is to make her less compelling as a character, which is a shame because Qureshi has a great deal of charm which shows up in unexpected times and ways. With a little bit more character development, she could have been truly memorable.

Although set in India, this is an American production so the sensuality is a little bit pronounced although still of the PG variety. There is some violence and the climactic sequences are fairly thrilling, although by the time the movie hits the two hour mark you’re pretty much ready for it to be done. I like the idea here a lot more than the execution.

REASONS TO SEE: Beautiful score and costumes.
REASONS TO AVOID: Far too long to be this passionless.
FAMILY VALUES: This is some mild violence and sensuality.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Sabharwal not only co-directed the film, but she did the narration (as an older version of Indira) and wrote the novel it’s based on.
CRITICAL MASS: As of 9/30/20: Rotten Tomatoes: No score yet, Metacritic: No score yet
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Remains of the Day
FINAL RATING: 5.5/10
NEXT: The Racer

We Are Many

Proof that politicians can ignore even the loudest voices of the people.

(2014) Documentary (Area 23a) Richard Branson, Hans Blix, Susan Sarandon, John Le Carré, Damon Albarn, Mark Rylance, Ken Loach, Danny Glover, Tom Hayden, Brian Eno, Noam Chomsky, Ron Kovic, Jesse Jackson, Robert Greenwald, Jeremy Corbyn, Gen. Lawrence Wilkerson, Tariq Ali, Philippe Sands, John Rees, Lord Charles, Victoria Branson, Rafaella Bonini. Directed by Amir Amirani

 

“The power of the people” rests in the will of the people to act in concert. When people unite, they can accomplish great things. That is, at least, the story we’ve been told, but what if I told you that somewhere between six and thirty million people worldwide gathered on the same day around the world to protest a war – and the war happened anyway?

After 9-11, the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan because reliable intelligence had the leadership of Al-Qaeda holed up in the caves of that country. The military might of the United States and its allies quickly overwhelmed the Taliban government of Afghanistan. After the collective trauma, grief and rage of the collapse of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon, it didn’t feel like enough. The Bush Administration turned its eyes to Iraq, the country that the president’s father had invaded nearly twenty years before. Aided and abetted by the Tony Blair government in the UK, the word went out that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he would launch at the West.

We know now that those weapons of mass destruction never existed, r if they did, they didn’t exist anymore. Blair, Bush and their governments knowingly and willfully lied to their citizens in order to popularize a war that they couldn’t legally justify. Most of the people of both countries bought the lies hook, line and sinker, myself included. Not everybody did, though.

Some felt that the war was an unjust one; that the real motivation for the war was to enrich the profits of the oil companies. “No blood for oil,” was the popular chant. Protests were organized in Europe and then, although social media was in its infancy, the Internet was used to plan and co-ordinate massive rallies across the globe. While the movement began in Europe, it quickly spread to become a worldwide phenomenon.

But as we all know, all the outpouring of dissent went for naught. A month later, the United States launched Operation Iraqi Freedom and the U.S. and many of its allies remain there to this day, 17 years later. Thousands of coalition soldiers never came home. The number of Iraqi dead may be as much as more 1,500,000. There is a little bit of a post-mortem, but other than one semi-tenuous link to much more successful protests later (more on that below), we really don’t get a sense of what the march actually accomplished, and its lasting legacy, if any.

One thing I would have liked to have seen is detailed information on how the massive march was coordinated. You get the feeling it was just kind of a grass roots seat-of-the-pants operation that just sprouted up independent of one another in various cities, countries – and Antarctica (that’s right). We get more information about the political goings-on leading up to that time – most of which is easily available elsewhere – and not nearly enough inside information on how difficult it was to coordinate the marches, the logistical issues they ran into, that sort of thing. We do get a lot of celebrity talking heads, talking about their involvement with the march. The only one I found truly compelling was Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff, Lawrence Wilkerson who expresses regret now about the events that brought the United States into Iraq.

The movie was actually filmed in 2013, ten years after the protest, so there is a bit of perspective here. The film has been given a virtual theatrical release, six years after its original theatrical release in 2014. For whatever reason, it never got a North American release back then, so now that we’re dealing with massive protests around the country, a pandemic and the most contentious Presidential election since the Civil War, I guess they figured the time was right.

You also have to take into account that at the end of the day, the war happened anyway, but the filmmakers don’t really address that in any detail. They do point out a tentative connection between the protest and the Arab Spring that took place seven years later, and they may not be wrong; certainly the organizers of those protests used the march as inspiration, but how much is subject to interpretation.

It is important that we remember the march because it was an important moment in which the world came together with one voice for possibly the first time – and were ignored by their leaders. It is a sobering thought that if peaceful protests that massive in nature may no longer influence the powers that be. One wonders how far the people will have to go to get their point across now.

REASONS TO SEE: Very timely given the current climate of protest around the world.
REASONS TO AVOID: Explains why the protests were made but doesn’t really get into how this massive event was organized.
FAMILY VALUES: This is some profanity and depictions of war violence.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The protest still remains the largest worldwide gathering of people; it took place on February 15, 2003.
BEYOND THE THEATERS: Virtual Cinema
CRITICAL MASS: As of 9/30/20: Rotten Tomatoes: 81% positive reviews, Metacritic: 70/100
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Winter on Fire
FINAL RATING: 6/10
NEXT: Draupadi Unleashed