Too much of everything

Powerful

Fantastic!

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Having seen a number of Bandit movies, this one offered the true story of 'Phoolan Devi' but there was not a lot of new content. The movie does not work too well actually. Phoolan kills 24 innocent thakurs out of hatred for two thakurs and finally has to surrender due to heavy police attention. When Phoolan surrenders, the crowd cheers but why? The movie does not show Phoolan doing a lot for the people. Phoolan belongs to Mallah community and that is perhaps the reason for the support as I presume the Mallah community is quite big. The movie also shows Phoolan' s hatred for her husband but does not convince us why there should be such deep hatred. There are minimal scenes of Phoolan's bandit action too. The movie might have restricted itself to the notes from Phoolan's jail diary which in itself might have been incomplete. Well, that is something that the movie maker needs to handle and complete.I think I liked 'Paan Singh Tomaar' better which was a more complete portrayal.

"Bandit Queen" is a controversial and groundbreaking Indian film (co-produced by Great Britain's "Channel Four") telling the real-life story of Phoolan Devi (Seema Biswas, excellent), a low-caste woman given to a husband at age 11 who runs away from him, is constantly violated by upper-caste males, until pairing with a handsome outlaw, Vikram Mallah (Nirmal Pandey), who shows her some respect and invites her to join his gang. Devi became a mythical national figure in her own lifetime (she had just been released from an 11-year prison term when the movie came out, and was murdered in 2001), hailed as "The Bandit Queen" or "Queen of the Ravines". Although at first Devi took legal action to ban the movie's exhibition in India (and it was actually banned for some time - after all, this is no Bollywood fantasy), she eventually changed her mind (plus, Channel Four paid her $60,000...).A lot has been said about the accuracy of everything portrayed on screen ("My life was much harder", Devi would have said after the first time she saw the movie). Just like he would do in 1998's successful "Elizabeth", Shekhar Kapur knows how to turn a larger than life, actual trajectory in a huge spectacle - but still keeping the essence of its core. Truth be told, this is one of those extraordinary sagas that if even half of what's portrayed on screen is real, it's already quite a journey. Kapur might have been a high-caste, city-bred man trying to portray the life of a brave and rebellious low-caste woman fighting for her survival - in a way that no other woman in her time had done, but that doesn't mean he doesn't know or doesn't have the right to try to depict this reality he doesn't directly belong to. How honest Kapur's original intentions were we can't know for sure, but that doesn't undermine his accomplishment here; this is a story that had to be told to a larger international audience. If a movie manages to work both as an adventurous spectacle and a tale of resurgence after national injustice and misfortunes, then it deserves to be seen. 8.5/10.

Irrespective of the accuracy of facts, Bandit Queen is a true story, its true because the themes it deals with hold as much truth today as they did way back in 1994. This movie is violent, powerful and thought provoking.The protagonist is a woman of flesh and blood, whose adversity brought out the best(or worst) out of her. Keeping the subjectivity aside, there is no doubt that Phoolan's character from a young girl of 8, who is married off by her father to clear a debt(pun intended), to a gang leader who goes on to become a leader of the lower caste, has evolved into a champion in her own right. Her portrayal is so powerful that the viewer is even willing to forgive her for a massacre.I can understand if the western audience is not able to appreciate this masterpiece, Bandit Queen needs to be 'studied' in the Indian context, and not just checked out in stereotypes. I may not be able to sell it on its universal appeal but its certainly a must watch for the Indian audience, its a shame that the movie had a delayed, overtly censored release in India.Bandit Queen is the story of a woman who fought against two odds in India, being a woman and that too a lower caste, her rebellious nature and inability to just give in caused her the most horrible experiences in life, which only went on to strengthen her into a self proclaimed goddess. She responded to violence with violence and dint become the submissive woman society wanted her to be. Call it divine justice or judiciary failure, had she killed a single person she would have been hanged, she killed 24 and got revered, respected and glorified.P.S # Whoever found her character "psychotic", needs to be sodomized at 8, gangraped by 10 men at a go and paraded naked. Then they should be asked- How normal do they feel?

Although I've only seen two films he's directed, I feel fairly confident in saying that Shekhar Kapur is a "big hammer" kind of craftsman. There are some directors who know that if they use a little hammer, the nail will come in just as straight, but there won't be as much noise. Jim Jarmusch is a good example of a "little hammer" kind of craftsman. He draws very little attention to himself, moves very slowly, and gets to a quality ending, almost without fail. Kapur, as a big hammer filmmaker, does his darnedest to make sure that everything that's onscreen is clear. He leaves virtually nothing to the intelligent viewer's imagination, nothing to figure out. When he finds a good symbol, he uses it over and over, almost until it loses are meaning. When he has themes that can be literalized, he makes sure he does it, rather than letting viewers read into the text. It's all there in its heavy-handed glory. As a little hammer fan, I've found both Elizabeth and Bandit Queen, to be slightly less than fully satisfying. However, just as I could appreciate Elizabeth for the wonderful performances, I found much to enjoy in Bandit Queen.Bandit Queen tells the true story of Phoolan Devi who, with the help of the media, gained a Robin Hood-esque notoriety in a small province of India in the 1980s. The film begins with Devi being married to a much older man at 11, not for money or for love, but because the man needs laborers at his house. The husband rapes her, the first of a series of rapes in the film. She runs home but, having aged a few years, she runs into trouble with the upper caste, the Thakurs when she turns down the advances of a rich man's son. She's sent away to cousins, where she first encounters a troop of bandits, led be Vikram, who kinda takes a shine to her for her spirit. But again she is sent home (the movie's plot is almost entirely composed of back and forths), only to be again kidnapped, this time by the bandits and this time for bounty. When Vikram kills the head bandit for raping her, Phoolan Devi gains full stature as a member of the Bandits until their Thakur head is released and all heck breaks loose. It's all very upsetting. The second half of the film is a vengeance drama, as Phoolan leads a mini-revolution against the Thakurs until she gains the attention of India's national government and she's arrested. But not before she becomes a hero, setting a completely new standard for female empowerment in the country.Should I be bugged by the genre of supposedly feminist films where the female protagonist goes it on her own, but really needs a man to untap her power? And that once that man untaps the power, he inevitably gets to both benefit from her power and her sexuality? Or should that not bother me? When Vikram and Phoolan raid a transport car, for example, Vikram first tells the passengers that they've been raided by Phoolan Devi's gang. Then he tells them that they've been robbed by the beautiful bandit. First he names her and then he takes away the name to objectify her. Later, when a Thakur boss flirts with her, Vikram tells her to shoot anybody who touches her. Is he telling her to protect herself, or is he protecting his investment? These are just a few of the sexual incongruities of the film. Kapur's need to produce drama and romance undermines the female empowerment at the heart of his tale.And as I've mentioned, Kapur is not a subtle director. This film features a half dozen scenes of marriages. All of the marriages are related in some way to bloodshed. Obvious enough for you? Ditto with the number of baths characters take. Basically whenever a character is about to embark on a new direction in life, they bathe. Almost as if bathing equals rebirth. Could be. I'd compare these images with the haircuts which bookend Elizabeth. Kapur seems desperate to make sure that you get what he's doing, so he takes all of the guesswork out of it.Still, the story is enriched by the triangulation of the story lines. Just as Phoolan Devi will always be an outcast because she's a woman, she will always be an outcast because she's of a lower caste. The minor problem is that she can't get anybody to be outraged with her about the gender thing, but getting people offended by the class disparity is a breeze. There's a proration of disabilities here that is probably very telling. Kapur is also very effective at handling the Bandit Queen as a decidedly rural phenomenon. He does an excellent job of showing how decentralized the Indian government is, both geographically and culturally. While everybody in the small towns views her as an idol, the English speaking government officials are mostly amused both by how long it took them to find out about her and by the level of her popularity.The performances are interesting, as is the technical beauty of the film. However, while we're shown repeated scenes of Devi's torture, we really see very little of the Bandit Queen in action. There's very little that's heroic in Kapur's depiction of her, unless we're just supposed to accept that because she's a woman who kicks a little butt she's worth adulation. I'm not sure that that is enough. Basically, the film validates the notion that she was a media invention. We basically see her get beaten, raped, and abused and then when we see her kill a couple people in rage that's supposed to not only justify but validate her. I'm unconvinced.I'm sure that Bandit Queen serves an important purpose, especially for Western viewers. Additionally, I'm equally certain that many of the stylistic problems I have with Kapur are cultural, the man directing out of the culture from which he comes. Still, this movie doesn't work as well for me as it should. I'd give it a 6/10.