Begum Jaan Movie Review: Vidya Balan Is Wasted In Cheesy Film That's Hard To Take Seriously

 

Nearly every line in this film, in fact, is delivered in tremendously wooden and stilted fashion, making me speculate that it was a film written in English, thought through perhaps in Bengali and then translated, sloppily, into a mix of Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu. The result sounds like a bad street play, with characters sounding like they've been dubbed even when they haven't. Sometimes they are dubbed, and awfully so. Pitobash Tripathy, for example, who plays Begum's lackey Surjeet, clowns around to amuse the resident prostitutes with animal sounds. This tomfoolery is done horribly, with sounds of actual animals and people pasted onto the lipsyncing actor instead of letting him go full Police Academy.

And when characters are actually talking, when actors like Balan and Naseeruddin Shah are elevating the material and making the words sound intriguing or sinister, the background score plays spoilsport and frantic shehnaai is thrown in. At other times the weather itself serves as punctuation, with squalls of rain around to wetly underline Balan's more mad-eyed declarations. The fact that people are standing around bone dry in her courtyard both before and after a rainstorm doesn't seem to matter. Just like the fact that the partition took place in August yet our Angry Indian Prostitutes play Holi soon after.

 

Ah, the partition. "At the stroke of the midnight hour," we hear Jawaharlal Nehru's voice boom from a radio as the women of the brothel gather around to dreamily listen. It is a disturbing, telling shot. The radio is in the foreground and the women are looking at it, rapt, disbelieving, somewhat confused. This last bit may be the truest thing in the film, since they are looking, in point of fact, at the back of the radio which faces no one - but the camera.

Begum Jaan is, thus, immensely hard to take seriously. A character portends her death by literally kicking a bucket, and I kept wondering if another character, named Salim, would eventually be crippled simply because of his name. (He is.) During the scenes of displacement, the weight of partition is expressed by a big tall Sikh bent over under a single little suitcase he carries on his shoulder. Representatives of India and Pakistan are shown to us with half their faces on screen, as if even aspect ratio is now taking sides. The main plot doesn't make sense, since a routine eviction - at gunpoint, at most - that could have been carried out by the authorities, is handed over to a madman so he can wreak utter (and inane) havoc.

Watch the trailer of begum Jaan:
 

Much could have been salvaged had the women of the brothel been fascinating, but none are given the sprawl to really do much of anything. Gauahar Khan is effectively bold when telling her lover about her body and how little it matters in the grand scheme of things, Pallavi Sharda does well as a girl with brothel-escaping dreams, but nothing here is particularly interesting, and nearly every accent is murder.

Two lesbians appear briefly intriguing, but the camera - so keen to shock throughout this film - shies away from their affection, choosing to show us Vivek Mushran getting kissed instead.

Begum Jaan could well have been a film about a fantastic bunch of feisty, disparate women taking on all odds, but alas. We're left only with memories of some melancholy bores.