Blind Rage:
The idea had so much potential—had writer Kanika Dhillon’s mainstream sensibilities aligned with director Devashish Makhija’s offbeat approach, Gandhari could have been a marvellous film.
Unfortunately it turns out to be a cluttered set of bizarre circumstances, and long action set pieces, in which the lead actress often takes a brutal battering, and has lines of blood trickling prettily down her face, instead of spitting out broken teeth!
Bani (Taapsee Pannu), her husband Gokul (Iskwak Singh) and six-year-old daughter Mishty (Myrah Shivam) are travelling in a train, when he gets to buy a snack, and she goes into the washroom. In that short span of time when the parents don’t have eyes on her, the child is abducted. Bani, in pursuit, is accidentally hit by a metal pole, and loses her sight.
The place they alight at, is the nightmarish Joypurra, overrun by painted Bahurupis (folk performers,with painted faces and bodies), and guarded by a fierce four-faced Goddess. There have been other kidnappings of little girls that point to a child trafficking ring, but the local cops are curiously apathetic. Kabir (Jatin Sarna) is sent from outside the town to investigate, and seems clueless.
Gokul and Bani go off on their own investigating spree and dig out more clues than the police. Bani is helped by her mentor, Jhunu (Mita Vashisht), a street food vendor who has her ear to the ground. When Bani was younger, Jhunu had taught her to fight and balance on beams blindfolded.
Even when she regains her sight, Bani pretends to be blind, so that she can go anywhere without arousing suspicion—the film is named after the character from the Mahabharat (mother of the Kauravas), who blindfolds herself because her husband cannot see. The parallel doesn’t quite work, but let that pass.
It would seem ordinary people in Joypurra are part of the trafficking ring, though the kingpin’s (Prashant Narayan) face is not fully revealed till much later. Bani—dressed like a warrior, her dupatta worn like a shield– gets into bone-crunching fist fights with an assortment of goons, as she comes close to solving the mystery. Meanwhile, Gokul is informed by a random old man, about a labyrinth of underground tunnels beneath the town, from which the abducted children will be smuggled out
As the strange twists and turns are piled up, the pace flags, and the proceedings become increasingly absurd. A mother’s grief and desperation are buried under bursts of colour, noise, rituals.
Taapsee Pannu, who has collaborated with Dhillon before on the Haseen Dillruba films, has the instinct for picking roles that place her at the centre of the action, but Gandhari fails her, because it pushes her into a chaotic screenplay that loosens its grip on the reins barely midway through the film. Ishwak Singh and Mita Vashisht do pick up some slack, without helping much. Actors like Chhaya Kadam, Chandan Roy and Swastika Mukherjee add value to the project by their very presence, but have little to do.
(This piece first appeared in seniorstoday.in)
