Batwara 1947 film review: Overwrought sermons on faith and motherhood smother Sunny Deol's India-Pakistan partition drama

Dubai: There is a potentially moving film buried somewhere inside Batwara 1947, an India-Pakistan partition drama built around the unlikely bond between Sikander Mirza, played by Sunny Deol, and Durgavati Devi, or Mai, played by Shabana Azmi.

He is Muslim, she is Hindu, and when his displaced family is allotted the Lahore home she refuses to leave, the two begin as adversaries before slowly forging an insanely emotional mother-son bond. It's a lovely premise about humanity surviving when religion, politics and borders. The problem is that the movie, directed by Rajkumar Santoshi and produced by Aamir Khan, doesn't trust us to understand any of it unless every emotion and message is spelt out, preferably more than once and accompanied by a song.

This is the kind of movie where an incredibly age-defying Preity Zinta, who plays Sikander Mirza's beloved 'begum', sees Mai visibly breaking down in tears and says something along the lines of, “Mai, are you crying?!.”

Well, yes. We can see that and her neighbour too can see those heaving shoulders. It's a tiny moment, but it tells you everything about the writing. Nobody is allowed to just grieve, love, hate or change their mind. They must tell us exactly what they are feeling and why, while the music nudges us towards the appropriate emotion.

The secular messaging gets the same treatment. The film clearly wants to underline that Islam is a religion of peace and dignity and that religion itself isn't the problem but what people do in its name is the issue. It also drums it in that humanity must ultimately trump religion or 'mazhab'.

All perfectly worthy thoughts, but Batwara 1947 repeats them with the enthusiasm of somebody terrified that we weren't listening the first five times. Even the dignity afforded to the dead becomes an opportunity for a lesson on faith and how its principles have been distorted into hatred.

And then comes the mother-is-bigger-than-religion philosophy. Is Mai Hindu? Does it matter? She is a mother, we are repeatedly reminded. A newborn doesn't say Ram or Allah first; it says “Ma”.

Motherhood is almost presented as a faith of its own. You can see where the movie is headed from a mile away, particularly once Sikander's hostility towards Mai begins thawing into affection. But instead of allowing that relationship to make its own case for humanity, the screenplay insists on explaining its significance to us.

Even the language feels strangely ornamental. Words such as inteqal and begum keep turning up in these stiff, carefully constructed lines, and after a while they feel less like the vocabulary of actual people and more like accessories attached to a heavily verbose period drama. That's perhaps the larger problem with the characters too: they are drawn in such broad shapes and shades of black, white and very obvious grey that they rarely feel like people caught in one of the messiest periods in history.

Partition surely produced people who were frightened, generous, selfish, cowardly, cruel and unexpectedly courageous, sometimes all at once. Here, everyone appears to have been handed a job description. There's the good Muslim, the bad Muslim, the bad Hindu, the victim, the mother, the saviour, the predator, the poet and the conscience-keeper. Ali Fazal, as the poet, gets that last job and fares better than most, but even he is required to carry the burden of articulating what the film wants us to think about humanity.

The treatment of women is equally exhausting. So many men seem to be chasing women down the street, threatening them, trying to assault them or swooping in to protect them that you begin wondering whether any man in this universe is capable of behaving normally around a woman. Sexual violence against women was, of course, one of the most horrific realities of Partition, but repeatedly placing women in danger as a shorthand for male evil doesn't automatically give a film depth. Here, it often reduces the women to victims and the men around them to either monsters or saviours.

And then there is the family melodrama, ladled on so generously that even scenes that should have been heartbreaking begin to feel synthetic. A woman searching for her missing family during Partition doesn't need much dramatic assistance, but Batwara 1947 gives her plenty.

Shabana Azmi's turn as the ever-sacrificial, sometimes terrified mother Durgavati was meant to be the emotional anchor of this story, particularly as her relationship with Sikander evolves from animosity to affection and eventually becomes the film's biggest argument for humanity over religion. Yet watching an actress as seasoned as Azmi being pushed towards such heightened dramatics is oddly unsettling.

This is a performer who can convey grief with a glance or a pause, but here she is often made to perform at the same feverish pitch as the movie around her. During some of the over-wrought scenes, I found myself wondering how they got Shabana Azmi to do all this and, less charitably, what they paid her to dial up the hysterics.

A funeral scene towards the end should have been devastating because it brings the film's central ideas together: who claims Mai, what dignity is owed to the dead, whether religion separates people even in death, and what Sikander's relationship with this Hindu woman has come to mean. But once again, the movie cannot resist turning an emotionally potent situation into another vehicle for speeches about religion and humanity. By then, the message has been repeated so often that what should move you begins to feel like another lesson.

Preity Zinta has a different problem as the well-preserved, age-battling mother. She looks so remarkably untouched by the passage of time that it occasionally becomes distracting, especially in a movie asking us to believe in years of hardship, loss and displacement. There's plenty of crying and family anguish around her, but once again the emotional temperature is kept so relentlessly high that the performances begin to feel wooden rather than moving.

Even the father-son relationship between Sikander and his son, played by Karan Deol, gets more lip service than emotional groundwork. Karan has relatively limited screen presence, but he's handed lines about how his father will see neither borders nor faces when he comes for the enemy and will simply destroy them. It's clearly meant to build anticipation for the Sunny Deol machinery to roar into action, but the problem is that the film has told us far more about the might of the father than it has made us feel the bond between father and son.

Sunny Deol fans will probably be more forgiving once the action begins because the film eventually gives them the heroics they came for. The action is ludicrous, oversized and comfortably uninterested in the laws of physics. But it also underlines the tonal confusion of a movie that wants to be an intimate story about a Muslim man finding a mother in an elderly Hindu woman, a sermon on religious tolerance, an old-fashioned family melodrama and a full-bodied Sunny Deol action vehicle.

None of those elements are necessarily incompatible, but Batwara 1947 piles them on rather than weaving them together. Perhaps its theatrical quality is intentional, but on screen it often feels like an elaborate stage production in which characters enter to represent an idea, deliver the relevant dialogue and exit. There's so much crying, shouting, singing, fighting and sermonising that it's remarkable how little of it actually gets under your skin.

That's the frustrating part because the central relationship doesn't need all this embellishment. We don't need to be repeatedly told that a mother is bigger than religion or that hatred comes from people twisting faith to suit themselves. Show us Sikander and Mai becoming family and we will get there ourselves.

Partition already provides unimaginable drama: homes abandoned, families separated, women violated, fortunes lost and people suddenly informed that the land they had considered home now belonged on the other side of a border. Batwara 1947 didn't need to manufacture emotion around that tragedy. It needed restraint, complexity and characters who felt like flesh-and-blood people rather than representatives of ideas. Instead, its great love for drama becomes almost scary. The movie has so much to say about humanity that it barely gives its humans room to breathe.