Three Patient Tries!

 

Patience is key to success in life.

Even the most impatient over-achievers were patient at some stage.

In Tamil, you have the saying: பொறுத்தார் பூமி ஆள்வார். (The patient ones shall rule the world).

Hindi also has it: सब्र का फल मीठा होता हैं (Fruit of patience is sweeter).

By a quirk of end-of-year fate, we watched three movies over the last few days - all of them extolling the virtues of patience. The choice was random. The coincidence uncanny.

Jai Bhim [Victory to Bhim]

[Tamil; Prime]

Loosely based on a real incident about the trials (literally) and tribulations (too literally) of a tribal woman belonging to Irular community (who live/d a life of catching snakes and doing other menial jobs). It is about one intrepid lawyer’s (Justice Chandru) struggle to find her husband and his friends after they disappear from police custody. Police brutality is common across the world. Degrees vary. But the depiction of the same in this movie has notched it up a few levels. Not for the faint-hearted. 

The court scenes are like Sehwag’s batting – playing to the gallery. Messages are hard-hitting. But what was really heartening was to see how patiently the case is unraveled – step by step, knot by knot. If it were a Vijay/Ajith movie, there would have been a few action sequences introduced to settle the matters then and there 😊 All the brouhaha about caste misrepresentation/change etc., simply misses the point in my opinion. The first five minutes of the movie simply hits the nail on the head and that is that. Jai Bhim is the rallying slogan by Dalits in India to remember Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar. Apt.

#StrongBhim 🌞🌞🌞⛅

Yara [Butterfly]

[Italian; Netflix]

Another movie based on a real-life incident that rocked Italy from 2010. It is the story of an investigator who goes to great lengths to find the culprit responsible for the disappearance of a teenage girl. How she goes about it methodically, amidst mounting political and departmental pressure, self-doubts, insecurities, mistakes et al., forms the crux of the movie. The scientific details are unobtrusive, and the super-methodical nature of the investigations hook you to the proceedings. 

What could have turned into an emotional mush has been handled deftly. The cinematization of events in certain portions – politician’s Sehwag-like (that man again!) proclamations, Bhagavad Gita moment for the heroine – they were probably added to make us feel for the story; but superficial since the premise was strong enough. Of course, the very patient sifting for the proverbial needle in the DNA stack was what ‘wow’ed us. Just went on to prove that real-life is often in a sllllloooow motion when compared to the reel life.

#FlutteringButterfly 🌞🌞🌞

Sardar Udham [Leader Udham]

[Hindi; Prime]

Indian Independence struggle is truly historic. In a protracted fight spanning more than a century, the largely non-violent approach was interspersed with some violent mutinies of various sizes. People still refer to the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny as the first struggle; but there have been several even before that.

Fast forward to 1919. The British government ruling India passes Rowlatt Act empowering the gahmen to try certain political cases without juries and permitted internment of suspects without trial. Tough. Protests sprang up all over the country and more so in Punjab. On 13^th April 1919, a large, peaceful crowd of men, women and children gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar. Rest, as the cliché goes, is bloody history.

This movie is about Udham ‘Ude’ Singh, one of the affected people from Jallianwala Bagh/Amritsar massacre in 1919. He becomes a revolutionary (a lovely definition by Bhagat Singh on what differentiates a revolutionary from a terrorist 💓); gets caught; escapes from the prison; travels through Afghanistan, Russia and reaches London; waits patiently like a vulture and assassinates Michael O’Dwyer, the Governor of Punjab who gave a carte blanche to General Dyer to ‘instill fear’ on that fateful day. Well, his wait was for almost 21 years to seek revenge! That is some patience, one might say!

Movie worked largely due to wonderful casting & excellent period setting. Vicky Kaushal as Sardar Udham, the investigating officer Stephen Hogan, Shaun Scott as the remorseless Dwyer – all of them carried the movie exemplarily.

The massacre scene was quite gory. Again, not for the faint-hearted. But that was nothing when compared to the next 20-odd minutes which were excruciating to say the least. Probably that was needed. In fact, in a tribute to Attenborough’s Gandhi, the first few shots of the massacre resembled the ones from Gandhi; but then it veered full left, right after that – after all, this is a movie about violence, right?

Thankfully, the movie was not jingoistic (unlike Uri – Vicky got a India National Award for acting in that!) to the large part and stuck to the known facts and figures.

#OdeToUde 🌞🌞🌞⛅

#sriGINthoughts #reviews #movies