This is the sort of bogus, sadistic picture in which two administrators meet and trade stories of communal hatred, murders, and rapes (their throats drying up as they speak) and then as if to break the tension, enquire about each other’s Paan-eating habits. He starts tender and then can be seen pausing in the middle of a passionate kiss to stare at the moon like a werewolf.
In playing the movie’s most pointless character and playing it really straight, Mushran mimics the tone of this whole enterprise. In those two brief exchanges, we see a glimpse of the truly tragic Indian past beyond Yuvakbharati’s history-textbook chapter 5: Indian Independence and Partition (which chapter, and its descriptions, is the basis for this movie’s setting).Ĭlosely interpreting this chapter for us is Vivek Mushran who listens to the Tryst with Destiny speech on a radio, and announces Azaadiiii to the common-folk around him, with the same energy that one uses to broadcast news of the winning-boundary at the end of a cricket match. Naseeruddin Shah may even have written his two-scene character himself his bowing down to his own decadence has more charm than the spirited fights of the other characters. 'No, it’s the Raja’s right!' he says, putting the title above the name. 'Who holds the first right to all the tender flowers in this land?' Shah asks, and as Balan’s Begum fumbles with a, 'You do,' Shah cuts her off with a sledgehammer of a line.
When Balan dresses up for her Rajaji, it suddenly creates a context for both the characters they magically become rooted in a time and place - there’s both old-world romanticism and a nod to painful political realities in the way Balan converses with Shah there. Shah’s Rajaji works up the lazy-elegance, winking as he goes about his role he is the type that can’t perform sex without music, and who squints at the chess-coins before making his move. The actress has two wonderful scenes with Naseeruddin Shah, who appears as the king of the territory that houses Begum’s brothel. It’s the second Begum that Balan almost nails. And then there is the Begum who wonders about the changing realities around her, and who can feel the earth beneath her feet slipping by. There’s of course the Begum who when she talks, seems to be reading out from her own resume. There are two Vidya Balan performances in this movie. But they weren’t about Hepburn trying to do butch-versions of Clark Gable on the contrary, Hepburn used her clout to play the dance with feathery performers like Cary Grant.īalan has that Hepburn-like toughness about her, but with directors such as Srijit Mukherji at the helm, that toughness simmers on the surface too evidently for it to be taken half-seriously.īut make no mistake.
In the golden age of Hollywood, movies were often thought up as Katherine Hepburn projects. I am completely up for movies being conceived as ‘Vidya Balan Summer Projects’ but if those movies are mere vehicles for hip-posturing, like this one clearly is, we may be at the risk of losing one of our finest actors. She’s a force of ‘nature’ by God, she may have even created nature! Not only is Balan here privileged with the punchiest of quotations and the most decisive of actions, even the horizon dissolves into her thinking face. The clouds occasionally rain themselves out, and as the rain streams down people’s faces, they thank Begum for her kindness.īegum Jaan is a movie so steadfastly subservient to its leading lady, that it turns everyone and everything into mere setups for Balan to deliver the graces. She talks to the birds, and then the birds fly away and tweet her saga far and wide, across lands and lampposts. In Begum Jaan, Vidya Balan (playing the eponymous Begum) puffs on her hookah-pipe, the smoke emanating from which creates clouds above, and birds appear in the clouds for Begum to talk to.