Movie review : post-colonial study

 Hello readers !

             Warmly welcome to my blog. This blog is part of my thinking activity task which  was assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad sir. In this particular task we have to write some of movie reviews with the reference of postcolonial perspective. 

👉CLICK HERE to view more about this task..........

💠Midnight's Children :

• Director :Deepa Mehta
• Writer : Salman Rushdie
• Running Time : 2h 26m
• Genre : Drama

                    The bigger story, about India, is told through a smaller one, about a family, and especially one boy: Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of the midnight hour on Aug. 15, 1947, the very moment of India’s birth as a free country. There are 1,001 children born at that hour, all with special powers, but many have died by the time Saleem  discovers that he can hear the other children’s voices in his head as if he were some kind of all-India radio.

                    Ms. Mehta seems most at home detailing the family life of the young Saleem in Bombay. The two women who rule that universe, his mother (Shahana Goswami) and the ayah (Seema Biswas) — the perpetrator of that baby switching — give the film emotional ballast that’s lost when Saleem leaves for Pakistan.

💠 The Black Prince :-

• Director: Kavi Raz
• Writer : Kavi Raz
• Running Time : 1h 58m
• Genres : Drama, History

                   The movie based on the true story of Duleep Singh, the last maharajah of Punjab, “The Black Prince,” written and directed by Mr. Raz, never finds a rhythm. Worse, Duleep remains a handsome cipher, brooding in the shadows of his own story until, upon occasion, someone thinks to ask, “What troubles you?”

                   The youngest son of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, ruler of northwestern India, the “Lion of Punjab” and the only child of Maharani Jindan Kaur (Shabana Azmi), Duleep Singh (Satinder Sartaaj) was crowned at the age of five, but was forcibly exiled to Britain, almost immediately after, where he became a favourite of Queen Victoria (Amanda Root). He survived even during the division and bloodshed as four potential successors got killed, and the British watched like “vultures”.

       He gets to learn about God, Christianity and other social etiquettes by his guardian, Dr Login , and is told that India benefited by the British rule. He is respectful to all but an uncanny sense of unease begins to discomfort him as he longs to see his real mother, who he is categorically told is “old and too weak to travel”. Perhaps the latent desire to be with his countrymen also begins to rekindle in him an inexplicable concern for the land of his birth: Punjab. When he gets permission to bring her to England, he gets more and more influenced by her to reclaim his birthright and overturn the escalating oppression of India by British colonialists.

💠The Reluctant Fundamentalist :

                  Mira Nair's "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" follows the transformations of the wide-eyed Pakistani Changez Khan , who arrives in the US with great professional ambitions. And he accomplishes much before the planes hit the World Trade Center, a crisis that challenges his materialism, leading him to step back from the many choices he's made, in his capitalist career and his love life. 

He narrates his story, seen in flashback, while meeting in the Pak Tea House in Lahore with American journalist Bobby Lincoln (Liev Schreiber). Quite bulky for a journalist, with something strange in his posture, Lincoln seems out of place. A local American professor has just been kidnapped. Khan, who has long since abandoned his clean-shaven face and American business suit for a beard and traditional Shalvar-Kameez, is now the leader of a questionable Pakistani activist movement. Lincoln thinks he might have some answers, but Khan insists on telling his own life story first. The choice seems odd, considering that a man's life is in danger.

            Nair has made a very smart film, whose ambitions sometimes exceed the piece's depths. "The world changed on 9/11" was a phrase we used to hear all the time. The film left me wondering how many of us were compelled to re-evaluate our own individual paths or modify our moral and political priorities during the long wars in the years that followed. Is Khan the exception? For the rest of us, then and now, as things around us get more nasty and complicated, life goes on.

Thank you....