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The late 1960's: As a kid, Phoolan (Sunita Bhatt) is sold off into
marriage to a stranger, Puttilal (Aditya Srivastava), who likes to torture
and rape her and shows no respect to her feelings. She eventually runs
away. Phoolan has grown up to a woman now (and is played by Seema
Biswas) back in her hometown, and she haqs caught the eye of Ashok (Gajraj
Rao), the headman's son. When she turns down his advances though, he
mercilessly rapes her, but when she reports this to the authorities, she
all of a sudden stands accused instead of her rapist, simply because she
is of a lower caste, and she is thrown out of her hometown. Ashok offers
to make it possible for her to return in return for sexual favours, but
when she refuses, he has her kidnapped by a gang of bandits living in the
nearby mountains. Phoolan gets raped multiple times, but eventually the
boss of the gang (Anirudh Agarwal), a despicable man to begin with, treats
her as his personal bitch, and brutally so. His second-in-command Vikram
(Nirmal Pandey) however has seriously fallen in love with her, and one day
when his boss is forcing himself onto her for the umpteenth time, Vikram
shoots him - and in the process becomes the new boss. Phoolan becomes his
second-in-command, but thanks to her cunning and her ruthlessness, but
also her social consciousness, she soon becomes the soul of the gang and
the person the gang is identified with, and legends soon make her into a
female Robin
Hood or even a sort-of Goddess. Eventually, the real leader
of the gang, SriRam (Govind Namdeo) is released from prison, and
officially he doesn't seem to mind about the changes Vikram and Phoolan
have made in the gang's structure - but he's a wolf in sheep's skin, and
not only wants to make the gang his own once again, he is also a police
informer, who has promised the cops to get rid of Phoolan and Vikram in
exchange for his freedom. One day out of the blue, Vikram is shot and
injured in the leg, and it's just his luck that Phoolan is intelligent
enough not to trust SriRam and drag him to the next city instead for
treatment - which saves his life. Once Vikram has recovered, he and
Phoolan wander the countryside, cut off from their gang, and eventually
Phoolan bumps into her once-husband Puttilal - and she brutally tortures
and humiliates him. Finally, Vikram and Phoolan are about to meet up
with their gang again, when Vikram is shot dead, while Phoolan is made
SriRam's captive and gang-raped by the whole gang, including him, then she
is grossly humiliated before the very people who considered her a kind-of
Goddess. Finally, she is left to die, but she carries on and soon hooks
up with Man Singh (Manoj Bajpai), a friend of Vikram's, to form a new gang
witht eh express purpose of taking BisRam and his gang out. While Phoolan
time and again almost succeeds in her mission while leaving a trail of
blood behind her, politicians start to worry about her because she has
been made an idol of the lower castes, which in turn might lead to revolt
against the whole caste system - thus she cannot be shot or be forcefully
captured but has to be made to surrender. So police round up and kill
pretty much all of her gang using unnecessary violence, leave her no place
to go, and threaten her family. Phoolan Devi ultimately sees herself
forced to surrender in 1983, but under quite a few conditions - which the
gouvernment is happy to fulfill, just to get rid of her. Despite her
many crimes, Phoolan Devi was released from prison on parole in 1994, when
a lower-caste party came to power in her region. She later (after the
movie was completed) launched a political career, but was assassinated in
2001. Bandit Queen is not a bad film - but it's
not a good film either: Problem is, it seems to have been made exclusively
for the (Western) arthouse circuit and for fans of something called world
cinema. This in turn means that the film goes quite some length
concerning its ethnological accuracy, goes an extra mile to hammer a
feminist message home with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer (I'm not
against the message here, just against its delivery), is accompanied by
some ethno-kitsch soundtrack we Westerners are supposed to identify with
East Asia (and have heard in countless other East Asian world cinema
flicks before and since), and is completely free of any irony on one hand,
but also of any inventiveness on the other. It's just a movie that gives
the world cinema crowd exactly what they have come to expect from the
genre (which they refuse to identify as a genre), but that lacks the joy
of filmmaking, of storytelling, of entertaining an audience. That all
said, the film is not a total failure, at least the cast (and especially
Seema Biswas) is pretty good, many Indian locations are used effectively
if not to their full effect, and at least the story the film is based on
is pretty interesting (and could have been made into a great film via good
storytelling). And all of this makes Bandit Queen not really good
but at least watchable.
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