If I were younger and brasher, I’d start this review with something as direct as: Gandhari is one of the worst Hindi films of the year. I’d rant about how it creates a world record for the number of scenes in which characters speak off-screen so as to hide the clunky exposition and dialogue added in post-production; how lip-syncing is a mythical concept; how this is salvage-job filmmaking at its peak. I’d go on about how the movie treats feminism, motherhood, child trafficking, gender-based violence, trauma and breathing as a smug SoBo aesthetic; how the phrase “my culture is not your costume” was invented for screenplays like these. I’d balk at the Do Patti-coded twists, disorienting music and editing, disjointed acting and disingenuous metaphors. I’d be outraged by the film’s Haseen Dillruba-coded lens of toxic love, where the scene of a husband and wife literally clobbering each other is scored to a romantic ballad: such a ‘punchy’ love language. I’d be angry to the point of incoherence, much like the film in question.
Fortunately, I’m not young and brash anymore. I’m older and a little wiser, so constructive criticism is my poison of choice. Instead of questioning the existence of Gandhari, it’s better to analyse the compromised nature of it. The movie revolves around a young mother, Bani (Taapsee Pannu), who suffers temporary vision loss during the abduction of her daughter at a railway station, and then pretends to be blind to get to the bottom of this crime and not because she’s a raging Andhadhun fan. The setting is the fictional town of Joypurra: fictional because there’s only so much Bollywood appropriation that Kolkata can handle. Her nice-guy-to-a-fault husband, Gokul (a brown-faced Ishwak Singh), is on his own mission to track the girl down through a trafficking gang called Black Hole (the joke writes itself). The title refers to the mythological queen in the Mahabharata — the mother of the Kauravas — who blindfolds herself in solidarity with her blind husband. For the unacquainted, fear not, for Bani’s mentor spells this out (“you will do this as a mother, not a wife!”), so that Bani’s quest can scrape the bottom of the barrels of symbolism.
It starts as one story, becomes another, then another, before it settles on behaving like a manic vigilante-mom thriller whose pronouns seem to be she/twist. The commentary is a last-ditch gimmick; what does a quote like “Behind every mother is a child…taken from the mother” even mean? Is it the same as “Behind every bad film is a director…taken from the film?” The hollow ornamentation is everywhere. The town is full of culpable locals, lazy cops, a conspiracy that makes hide-and-seek games in school look clever, and traveling behrupiyas (impressionists) who become prime suspects: a meek attempt at capturing the distortions of social prejudice. Most of director Devashish Makhija’s independent-minded titles are located in this uncomfortable space — Joram, his last, was his most accomplished — but Gandhari feels like an exoticised imposter reimagined for fifth-screen viewing habits. Ironically, this is precisely the sort of mainstream vision that his nihilistic worlds used to humanise: from training montages to unlikely saviours to everyday bigotry.
The best sequence of Joram was a stand-off in a moving train, and the child is kidnapped from one here, but things go downhill the second you see Taapsee Pannu’s blindfolded Bani speaking to thin air and conversing with an electric pole to elicit our sympathy. How else will we know that she’s wronged and desperate if she doesn’t mistake humans for inanimate objects? There is a villain who is revealed in half-shots and installments; the film runs out of close-ups of his facial parts by the end, and he has no choice but to appear as a full name on the cast list. When we see Bani hiding in a sack in a car, the shot of her face makes it look like she’s hiding under a brown blanket on an anxious honeymoon night. When the story jumps forward a month, Bani’s mutation into Super-Bani is for some reason presented in flashbacks. Then why jump forward? Who is the timeline trickery for? Why are you doing this to me?
My raw feelings aside, Bani is physically beaten to pulp by different men, and the film wears this violence as a performative badge of honour (I’m calling dibs on the reaction: “if you can’t see women battered like this, you are part of the problem”). There’s also an outsider cop (a confused Jatin Sarna) and his subordinate (Priti Shroff), who look like they’ve been kidnapped themselves and forced into this mess against their wishes. They serve no purpose. The only semi-decent moment is inspired by Sriram Raghavan’s cinema; a woman feigning blindness has to preserve her poker-face while sprinkling holy water on the corpse of a child that could be her daughter. Pannu’s hamming is baked into the conceit, because Bani is faking her condition, her emotions, her motives and her entire marriage. Needless to mention, it still does not work. The rest of the cast — significant names, most of them — makes up a god-fearing town that uses religion as a ruse for nefarious intent. They’re neither blink-or-miss turns nor flesh-and-blood figures; the reason they exist is to become one of the 18 twists in the second half.
The craft is self-destructive. At one point, an 80s-goddess-style ‘Jaago’ anthem plays when an unconscious Bani hears her girl’s cries; at another, she vows to dismantle the entire trafficking industry and fights her husband because he only wants to save their daughter. The transformation is not earned, there is no flow to the storytelling, and no sense of emotional authenticity. A Kanika Dhillon screenplay used to be a hit-or-miss entity. For the messy ambition of every Judgementall Hai Kya and Manmarziyaan, there was the jarring artifice of Guilty and Do Patti. On paper, Bani is weaponising the fragility and tropey-ness (flawed woman=alcoholism, smoking, mental illness, affairs) of all those protagonists. But Gandhari is just fundamentally broken. You keep waiting for a story to crawl out of the debris of refurbished frames and retro-fitted chases. But the medium is accidental, not even incidental. This is an assortment of sequences that pretends to be a film about a mother who pretends to be blind, human and everything in between. And if it isn’t already obvious, I’m pretending to be older and wiser.