How many times are filmmakers going to revisit the same crime scene? To what end? Some stories fatigue themselves.
After the gruesome terrorist attacks of 26/11, a cottage industry mushroomed. There were films like Ram Gopal Varma’s The Attacks of 26/11 (2013) so close to the action it felt immoral; Hotel Mumbai (2018), which looked at the massacre from the perspective of those working at the Taj; and Major (2022), a biopic on one of the martyred Majors. Shows, too, cropped up, Nikkhil Advani’s Mumbai Diaries 26/11 (2021), which looked at the massacre from the perspective of those working in the hospital; State of Siege: 26/11 (2020), about the military operation.
Dread became cinematic inspiration. Trauma porn, a vision of delight. You need to be an exceptional storyteller to make this story feel worth telling.
What does Bharat Bhhagya Viddhaata, then, do in this saturated marketplace? It turns the focus to the nurses of Cama Hospital — how they bore the brunt of that night, and through courage, hope, and an unwavering devotion to their duty, saved lives.
The problem is that the film does this in the only way some storytellers know how to — putting the nurses on pedestals, by hollowing out their humanity. As the film, a rather slim two hours and 10 minutes, concludes, what we end up celebrating are not nurses, but idealised, squeaky clean, flattened, and frankly, exhausting shadows of nurses.
Geeta Madhav Kamble (Kangana Ranaut), based on real life nurse Anjali Kulthe, is introduced courage-first. She is the only one who has seen all of what ended up at Cama Hospital, and is asked to identify the terrorist. Her family is against this. What if the terrorists attack them when they find out Geeta identified Kasab?
Geeta briefly hesitates — flashback to the night.
The nurses are introduced with quirks — this one spouts Urdu poetry, in Marathi translations; that one is a goon, married to another goon. There is a sweet push and pull to the scenes where the nurses banter, this one’s kindness, that one’s tough love, this one’s meekness, that one’s forthrightness. Ranaut’s sweet laughter perfumes these interactions. But her presence has a distending effect.
Ranaut walks into scenes where she is confronting superiors the way rogue college presidents walk into the dean’s office — all swagger. She walks into scenes with her patients, the way a mother walks into an ailing child’s room, kissing foreheads, holding them close to the chest, promising a better tomorrow. It is cloying, but that is the register the film chooses to tell its story in. You try to slip into this register, but the storytelling is so weak in its bones, all close up and reaction shots, all kind dialogues and soft humiliations, it is not able to lift these cloying moments into something tender. It begins to feel like these characters are imposing with their kindness.
Geeta prescribes medicine to patients, and instead of building the scene to note that in a space where doctors are scarce, nurses are being forced to take the mantle of doctors — something they are neither equipped nor expected to — the scene plays out with the doctor noting Geeta being just as reliable and knowledgeable as a doctor. These are moments where the professional ethics of a nurse fumble, but the film chooses to use it as a stage to perform the nurse’s heroism.
Geeta is so heroic, in fact, she forgets to feel panic when the guns start fitting. It is a strange build-up to the arrival of the terrorists, more confusion than fear, more inspiration than doubt. When one of the nurses has a crisis of faith, abandoning everyone to their own, it feels so planted, you wait for the nurses to narrate out loud the oath they took to each other, to protect. This could have been a moment where the nurses take succour from the collective to elevate their individual doubts. But no, Bharat Bhhagya Viddhaata wants to frame it as these individual nurses expressing their individual gumption. At a time when the hospital is scrambling to hem in its people and lock up, this is an overwritten moment, as though with the gaze of retrospection. It feels like they are narrating heroism instead of inhabiting it. Once inspired, the nurses go to their respective floors.
In Mumbai Diaries 26/11, the hospital has this run-down pathos, where the infrastructural collapse of the hospital is exposed alongside the terrorist attack. Here, all the walls and wards are clean, all the corners swept, all the glasses transparent, and all the mirrors reflective. It creates the atmosphere of forced sterility. Besides, the long oners of Mumbai Diaries 26/11 helped not just create a coherent sense of time and tension, but also of space. We knew the hospital’s layout, roughly speaking. Here, neither time nor space are given adequate attention. We only know where the terrorists are when Geeta forcefully mentions it in the dialogue. If a scene leaves Geeta with a depressed, pregnant woman bleeding on the staircase as terrorists gun down people above, after a few scenes, we return to Geeta, still on the staircase trying to get the depressed, pregnant woman into a safe room to deliver her child. The film is not able to answer the simple, pivotal question, essential to a thriller—is time running parallel or ticking forward?
There is a later scene where in the midst of the terrorist gunfire everyone begins a human chain, passing pieces of beds and chairs to create a barrier, so the terrorists, who are upstairs, are not able to come down, their pathway blocked. An inspiring song plays, leeching any trace of tension from the film’s dwindling surface.
A final contrast, promise. While Mumbai Diaries 26/11, for all its clunky flashbacks, took great pains to create characters before thrusting them into the chaos, here, the nurses are the consummate heroes and everyone else — the doctors who are completely absent and the head of the hospital who follows rules to the point of incapacitation — are caricatured. The security guards have their little moment, but they are so unfit for the role, the disproportion stings. How do you trust a film that can only create heroes by villainizing everyone else? It begins to feel like narcissism.
Then, there is Ranaut’s strained presence. When she has to exceed the naturalism of the character — foregrounding her inspired theatrics, for example, or screaming at the crowd of patients families who are causing chaos, she becomes too expressive, her limbs move with excess, you can feel her entering the realm of heroism, all flared eyes and puffed chest, and monotone voice.
I don’t need to buy into her Marathiness, with that lax Marathi accent that comes and goes, but I need to buy into her humaneness. Framing her with such bravado, every scene is pre-chewed by her victory — it is not ‘look what she is going to go through’, but ‘look how she will vanquish the enemies’. That framing ruins the film which is supposed to be buoyed by tension. And in tension’s absence, there is nothing else to hold onto. Heroism needs foreplay — a build up, some simmer, a little bit of swagger, and perhaps a limp? Something off-center?
Finally, when Geeta breaks down, I was reminded of Tanu Weds Manu Returns (2015), where Ranaut’s final breakdown was wrenching, as though crumbling under the weight of all that hostile swagger that kept her character afloat. You can see a character slipping out from under the expectations made of her. Here, you only see a performance.
The film gets its name from the title Narendra Modi bestowed upon nurses, among other frontline workers. They do the work that keeps the country churning, and makes life possible. It is a semantic sleight of hand. The question of how their material lives have been improved, bettered, softened gets lost in the din of this re-naming. Give them laurels, they won’t ask for lunch.
The problem with films like Bharat Bhhagya Viddhaata, then, is that they assume the only way to pay respect to the labour is by turning labourers into divine heroes. And in doing so, it commits the same crime as the indifferent — it forgets to see them as humans.