National Award winning Bengali director Srijit Mukherjee makes his Hindi language debut with this remake of his own Rajkahini, and it turns out to be an odd choice of film. Begum Jaan is a highly melodramatic film that waxes frequently on how Hindus and Muslims are the same beasts, but - at its core, under all the shrillness - it is a frustratingly straightforward film about an eviction being carried out.
The brothel is run by the titular Begum Jaan, played like a banshee by the usually wonderful Vidya Balan. It is devastating to watch an actress of Balan's caliber turned into this kind of caricature, a woman who starts off like an angry Kirron Kher and ends up going gale force Rakhee. It is also mystifying why she would want to run a brothel, given the way Begum constantly complains about her life and her lot. Considering how she speaks exclusively in platitudes, she could have had a fine career painting silly idioms onto the backs of bullock carts.

Begum Jaan Movie Review: The film is immensely hard to take seriously
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.

Begum Jaan Movie Review: A still from the film
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.