There’s no doubt about it: Shekhar Kapur is a terrific storyteller, a highly visceral powerhouse filmmaker who can depict terrible brutality with an unflinching yet not exploitative gaze. Its leader is shot to death by the handsome, enlightened Vikram Mallah (Nirmal Pandey) while raping Devi in no time Devi and Mallah are an Indian Bonnie and Clyde with Robin Hood instincts. A woman of lesser spirit and strength surely would have died or been driven mad by such incessant brutality and public humiliation, but Devi (now played by Seema Biswas) survives, propelled inevitably into an outlaw gang. Yet in running away from her husband, Devi rapidly discovers that now she has no status to protect her from rape by many men, in particular the higher-caste Thakurs. From the start, however, young Phoolan (played as a child by Sunita Bhatt) displays a proud resistance to her fate. She has in effect been sold into slavery and is promptly raped by her husband. A member of the lowly Mallah caste of fishermen and their families in the state of Uttar Pradesh, she is traded by her father to a man 20 years her senior in exchange for a bicycle and a cow. Kapur and Sen place Devi at the worst possible conjunction of caste and gender. “Bandit Queen” is an astonishing, overpowering piece of rabble-rousing, consciousness-raising, epic-scale filmmaking that unquestionably breaks ground in the Indian cinema in brutal candor if not theme. That’s good advice because regardless of how close it is-or isn’t-to the facts, this explosive picture is as potent in projecting its myth of the outlaw hero as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” or “The Adventures of Robin Hood.” Director Shekhar Kapur and writer Mala Sen have bonded dynamic adventure and romance and fiery social protest together with an electrifying effectiveness. It is not rated.Phoolan Devi, released earlier this year after 11 years’ imprisonment, has said of the hotly controversial Indian film “Bandit Queen” that it “should be called a work of imagination and not my real life story.” The Bandit Queen, at the Outer Circle and Shirlington Cineplex Odeons, is in Hindi with English subtitles. (The real-life Devi reportly plans to run for public office apparently, her lower-caste followers are unconcerned with her bloody history.) Biswas brings enormous ferocity and tenacity to the title role of "The Bandit Queen," a test of endurance not only for the heroine, but the audience.
Like notorious outlaws of the American West, she becomes a legend among the people and a political force to be reckoned with.
Still more tragedy awaits Devi, but the heroine perseveres. The two steal from the rich Thakurs and give some of the loot to the poor.
A gang leader pro tem, Vikram teaches Devi to kill and rob and invites her to join the gang. The abuse continues until she becomes the lover of Vikram Mallah (Nirmal Pandey), a tough but tenderhearted hunk who saves her from yet another rapist. Teenage Devi (the sensual Seema Biswas) must put up with sexual taunts of the high-born youth, who spend their days ogling the women working the fields.Īfter fighting off one these louts, Devi is banished from the village when she attempts to come home, she is arrested, raped and beaten by the corrupt police. But the upper-caste Thakurs in her village consider her a fallen woman. The next morning, Devi manages to escape and return to her family. "You're my wife you have to do this," he says, before forcing himself upon the screaming child. Though he has decided that she's not quite "ripe," the bridegroom becomes aroused while slapping her around. In her husband's home, Devi becomes little more than a slave, though it's obvious she hasn't the strength to carry the heavy water jugs or the skills to herd the goats. Her mother tries to hold on to her little girl for another six months, but the bridegroom is eager and needs someone to do the chores. The 11-year-old daughter of a poor lower-caste farmer, she is married off to a much older man in exchange for a cow and a bicycle.
And while director Shekhar Kapur doesn't graphically depict the frequent assaults Devi endures, he does not flinch from the sordid material either.ĭevi is a flat-chested stripling (Sunita Bhatt) with an already well-developed contempt for men when her life takes its first terrible turn. Set in a remote corner of India, the film is a veritable catalogue of mental and physical abuse, including pedophilia and gang rape. Based on Devi's diaries, this powerful but grueling Indian film is not only a tribute to her spirit, but also a searing indictment of a culture corrupted by the caste system and degraded by chauvinism. A low-born Hindu woman becomes a folk heroine when she turns on her upper-caste abusers in "The Bandit Queen," a brutal biography of famed outlaw Phoolan Devi.