Film Review: Postcolonial Films: Midnight's Children, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, The Black Prince and Abdul & Victoria

 Hello Readers,

This blog this is a part our academic activity of POSTCOLINIAL STUDIES. Here, four film reviews are written. It was also guided by Dr. Dilip Barad in his blog that how to write a film review. Click here for more reference. 

Four postcolonial films are reviewed here.

1. Deepa Mehta's Midnight's Children

2. Mira Nair's The Reluctant Fundamentalist

3. Kavi Raz's The Black Prince

4. Stephan Frears' Victoria and Abdul

1. Deepa Mehta's Midnight's Children

'Midnight's children' is a novel written by British-Indian Novelist Salman Rushdie and filmed by Deepa Mehta. The film was very popular in foreign countries and well criticized in India also.

The is collage of many things like history, culture, Colonialism. freedom movement. 

like National History in Fictional way. Deepa Mehta try to make it Dreamy and Dramatic. Salman Rushdie is himself  screenplay writer, though it is not as good as novel.

Decolonizing of human mind and how we look at freedom struggle or nationalism also is very important. This people who are cross over people hybrid identities like Deepa Mehta, Mira Niar.. They look at history in rather different perspective and which are normally not much in same way and their work hatred r being attacked  by Hindutva identities or people.

The film is not very good film, the way Novel has been appreciated time and again  and we see that screen play written by same writer of novel yet, even it is not as good as novel. It goes to that idea that when same writer translate the work, it’s not good translation but, it may be not 100% true theory because, writer like  Harold Pinter, who was also screen paly writer, but His understanding  medium of media and stage very well.

2. Mira Nair's The Reluctant Fundamentalist

A young Pakistani man is chasing corporate success on Wall Street where he finds himself embroiled in a conflict between his American Dream, a hostage crisis, and the enduring call of his family s homeland.  It is a 2012 political thriller drama film based on the 2007 novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist byMohsin Hamid, directed by Mira Nair, starring Riz Ahmed and Kate Hudson in lead.  the young man, Changez Khan, is a bearded Pakistani radical, not a sympathetic type on American screens. Finally, as the tale unfolds, clues mount that he might be a terrorist and the American might be a spy who has come to kill him, although this remains ambiguous — a literary trait hard to capture on film.

And yet the movie is opening on Friday, directed by Mira Nair, who may also seem an odd choice — “an Indian director making a Pakistani film in America,” as she puts it.

3. Kavi Raz's The Black Prince

In Victorian court artist Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s portrait, Maharaja Duleep Singh stands swathed in rich robes, a bejewelled turban and a sword in his hand — more romantic hero from the Orient, less king in exile.

But the painting, commissioned at Osborne by Queen Victoria, hid a darker truth — a history that led to the decimation of the Sikh empire consolidated by Duleep’s father, Maharaja Ranjit Singh; two Anglo-Sikh wars that lowered the pennants of the Sikh chiefs; the British takeover of Punjab, and the exile of the young Duleep. Separated from his mother Jindan Kaur, Duleep was as much a war trophy as the famed Koh-i-noor he was forced to gift the Queen.

It is this daring journey of self-discovery, which inspired Sikhs to fight British imperialism until Independence, that Indian-born British writer-actor-director Kavi Raz brings to life in The Black Prince.

4. Stephan Frears' Victoria and Abdul

Stephen Frears returns to royal territory with the debut of his new film, Victoria & Abdul, about an unusual relationship the queen had toward the end of her life.

Judi Dench returns to form as Queen Victoria in the late 19th century. Bored of her royal duties, and increasingly depressed at the world around her, she meets Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal), a handsome Indian clerk who is recruited to be a part of a Golden Jubilee ceremony. The queen sees in Abdul a joy in life, unlike the staff around her who constantly brings her bad news.

They grow closer and closer, and he begins to teach the monarch Urdu. The royal court is horrified that she has taken to a lowly Muslim servant, and they take action to sabotage their intimate friendship and send him back to India.