52 Films by Women Vol 2. 14. VICEROY'S HOUSE (Director: Gurinder Chadha)
Gurinder Chadha (born 10 January 1960) is the most
successful British Asian film director working in British cinema today. She
shouldn’t just be an inspiration to women, but to men also. Best known for her
football (soccer) comedy Bend It Like
Beckham (2002), which grossed £11m on initial release in the UK (from a
£3.5m budget) and $32.5m on its US release in 2003, she made her feature debut
with the domestic abuse themed comedy Bhaji
on the Beach (1993) and followed it with the BBC TV movie, Rich Deceiver (1995). Her other films
include the American ensemble comedy, What’s
Cooking (2000), an Anglo-Indian musical take on Jane Austen, Bride and Prejudice (2004), the teen
comedy, Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging
(2008) and the black comedy It’s A
Wonderful Afterlife (2010) as well as a segment from Paris, I Love You (2006). She frequently collaborates with her
husband, Paul Mayeda Berges, as co-writer and producer. She co-created the
reality soap, Desi Rascals (2015) which
ran for twenty episodes. The gap between the release of It’s A Wonderful Afterlife and the release of Viceroy’s House is seven years, the longest between films in her
career. When I met her briefly in 2016, she had just turned in her first cut
and explained that she had previously been barred from directing another
British-Asian film because they wanted a more experienced director. She
declined to mention the film, though The
Best Exotic Marigold Hotel springs to mind.
Viceroy’s House is
her most ambitious project yet. Filmed in eight weeks on location in Jodhpur,
Rajasthan in India from 30 August 2015, with the Umaid Bhawan Palace standing
in for the titular location, Rashtrapati Bhavan (‘President’s House’),
President Modi’s residence in Rajpath, New Delhi, it stars Hugh Bonneville (Downton Abbey) as Lord Louis
Mountbatten, despatched to India to hand over the country to a government in
waiting. The difficulty is that Hindus and Muslims are bitterly divided. The
Head of the Muslim League, lawyer turned politician Muhammad Ali Jinnah (Denzil
Smith) seeks a homeland for Muslim Indians, Pakistan. Palestine was divided,
why not India? Mountbatten who describes in the film his last assignment,
Burma, as ‘hell on Earth’ is sent to build trust amongst the parties. For the
group of British governors who turn up at Viceroy’s House on Day Two, violence
is out of control; the British can’t get out of India quickly enough.
The film has three objectives: to show, in broad strokes,
how partition took place; to let Lord Mountbatten off the hook as being the
architect of the mass migration of 14 million Indians that resulted in the
death of one million; and to make an entertainment that is palatable to Indian
audiences as well as British ones. It
moves constantly between events discussed in Viceroy’s House’s fine rooms and
gardens and the point of view of the Indian serving staff who attend to the
Mountbatten family and their guests.
It has been criticised for not explaining the British
rulers’ role in the violence that swept the country. Who exactly was it that
was forcing Muslim families to leave India – the result of the partition
agreement – and Hindus, Sikhs and others to leave the area designated as
Pakistan. It has a more fundamental dramatic problem: the constant shifts
between points of view mean that empathy for the characters gets lost. The
Indian romantic sub-plot between Mountbatten’s Hindu valet, ex-prison officer
Neet Kumar (Manish Dayal) and Aalia (Huma Qureshi), Muslim assistant to Lady Pamela
Hicks (Lily Travers), Louis’ youngest daughter, lacks the spark to make us
care. The subject is too big for a one hour and forty six minute movie.
Perhaps the most surprising thing from an English point of
view is that employees were allowed to strike their departing British rulers
without any physical reproach. It is as if the British had fully accepted
Indian anger and, after a minor ticking off, walked away from it. The film has
other details that don’t sit right. When Louis meets Jinnah for the first time,
Louis’ wife Edwina (Gillian Anderson) is there to quote the Muslim League
leader back to him. Would she have been in the room? Chadha wants to emphasise
the pacifying role that Edwina played: she is shocked by the illiteracy rates
(92%) and is keen to support improvement. She fires an English employee for
claiming that the Indians get ‘too damned close’ and asks the kitchen to
prepare more Indian fare. (‘All those years spent learning to cook their food –
wasted,’ complains the sous chef in his own language.) Edwina explains that there will be an equal
number of Indian guests to the British; the House will be more inclusive.
What of the role Lord Mountbatten played? According to the
film, having had success in the recapture of Burma from the Japanese, the
former commander of Allied forces in South East Asia was despatched to India as
charismatic peace broker, one who when he first meets future Indian Prime
Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (Tanveer Ghani) and hears Nehru’s rancour about
Indians imprisoned for undermining the British during World War Two, reminds
him that he owes a debt to England for honing his debating skills (Nehru studied
Natural Science at Trinity College, Cambridge). According to General ‘Pug’
Hastings Ismay (Michael Gambon), Mountbatten could ‘charm a vulture off a
corpse’. We don’t see Mountbatten’s famed brokering skills in action; rather,
at various moments we see him ill-tempered and tetchy, snapping at Pamela when
she calls him over to say she has been asked to be a bridesmaid at ‘Lillybet
and Philip’s wedding’. Mountbatten’s
response is immediately conciliatory; he is never shown angry for long.
Sub-standard sub-plot
The sub-plot, which is by far the least interesting part of
the film and sits oddly with the virtual history lesson that Chadha and her
co-screenwriters Berges and Moira Buffini give us, involves Neet attempts to
win Aalia over after discovering that she is promised to another – her fiancé
secures a job as Jinnah’s driver. Whilst Aalia’s blind father, Ali Rahim Noor
(the late Om Puri) was in jail, Neet ensured that he was treated well. Ali has
no idea that Neet loves his daughter. He asks him whether the girl whom he
wants to marry has finally agreed. Neet looks at Aalia and replies, ‘no’. The film
has buckets full of pathos along this line – Neet being unable to dance with
Aalia as they are from different religious backgrounds. Conversations in
Viceroy’s House between the couple are constantly interrupted as they assume a
formal position standing next to one another when senior British people march
past or when Aalia is asked by Lady Pamela ‘is everything all right?’
The ‘stiff upper lip’ attitude of the British is somewhat
overdone, with two exchanges amounting to ‘don’t show them how we feel; mustn’t
let the side down’. The most physical performance is given by Anderson. You
become keenly aware of her dipped head, hunched but perfectly straight
shoulders and clipped delivery. In contrast to Bonneville, Anderson is tightly
controlled, oh so obviously acting and yet she is spectacularly convincing.
Accents
One of the more curious decisions is to cast Indian
statesman with working class English accents. So Nehru, Jinnah and a
tooth-depleted Mahatma Gandhi (Neeraj Kabi) sound odd, somewhat weaker and less
charismatic than Mountbatten and a bit like miscast amateurs. Chadha appears to
be making the point that the relationship between the British and the Indians
is unequal. However, the decision weakens any attempt at authenticity.
Lord Mountbatten’s role as first Governor General in India
(until June 1948) isn’t mentioned, though we do see Edwina countenance, ‘we
must stay’. Perhaps the biggest liberty is the changing of the sign from
‘Viceroy’s House’ to ‘Government House’. I’ve no doubt this happened, but if
Mountbatten remained Governor General, he didn’t move out straight away.
Humour
Moments of broad humour punctuate the film, from Mountbatten
seeking to be dressed in two minutes (I won’t spoil the punch line) to Edwina
and Pamela staring longingly at the chicken prepared for the dog before helping
themselves. When partition is agreed, the contents of Viceroy’s House are split
80-20 between India and Pakistan, down to pots and pans and books in the
library. India gets to keep Jane Austen, a reference to Chadha’s own Bride and Prejudice. When one of the
Brits (David Hayman) is struck by an Indian, he complains that the place ‘is
like Glasgow on a Saturday night’.
Overall, Viceroy’s
House is uneven. It is made with attention to period detail and some
historical accuracy and has a point to make about how partition was arrived at
(I won’t spoil that either). Although there is newsreel footage showing
privation, it doesn’t have a profound emotional impact. Rather it strikes a
hopeful tone, although one it doesn’t earn.
Reviewed at Cineworld
Fulham Road, London, Saturday 4 March 2017, 20:15 screening
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