1 Star (out of 4)
Watch Gandhari on Netflix
Gandhari is what happens when someone tries to remake Kahaani without understanding what made Kahaani so special.
Gandhari writer Kanika Dhillon is no slouch at weaving together multiple plot threads, as she did in the Haseen Dillruba films. That’s what makes Gandhari‘s slapdash plot so shocking. Disjointed directing by Devashish Makhija makes the movie-watching experience all the more frustrating.
Gandhari marks Taapsee Pannu’s sixth project with Dhillon, having previously starred in those Haseen Dillruba films. This time, Pannu plays Bani, wife of Gokul (Ishwak Singh) and mother of 5-year-old Mishty (Myrah Shivan). While the family is on a trip, their train stops briefly in the town of Joypurra. A woman nabs Mishty while Bani is in the restroom and Gokul is buying snacks.
Bani chases the woman carrying Mishty across the platform, but she runs headfirst into a metal pole. The woman escapes, leaving Bani and Gokul to file a police report while also dealing with Bani’s head injury. The police are no help, and Bani’s concussion results in temporary blindness. The couple will have to find their missing daughter on their own.
Well, not entirely on their own. A federal government official named Kabir (Jatin Sarna) arrives with his assistant Sanjukta (Priti Shroff) to follow leads on a child trafficking outfit known as the Blackhole Gang, the history of which they explain in excruciating detail. Kabir and Sanjukta never interact with Bani, which is weird. It’s as if Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s Fed character in Kahaani never talked to Vidya Balan’s Vidya.
In this unfamiliar town, Bani just happens to run into her adoptive mother Jhuna Amba (Mita Vashisht) from back in her days as a child acrobat. Over the next month, Jhuna Amba secretly teaches Bani how to be a blind ninja assassin.
If that sounds stupid, it’s because it is.
All of this takes place in a town where seemingly everyone is involved in this child-trafficking ring. I don’t know much about gang finances, but employing so many people in a dangerous racket and buying their secrecy seems prohibitively expensive. Some retroactive continuity meant to connect Bani’s past to the Blackhole Gang that makes the plot even more ridiculous. It’s so bad, it’s actually funny.
Pannu put a lot of physical work into preparing for this role, and it’s a shame that the script lets her down. Action scenes are shot awkwardly and edited poorly, so nothing looks as good as it could have. The acting across the board is fine, given quality of the material.
Comparisons between Gandhari and Kahaani are fair, given how much the stories overlap. Both feature women looking for a lost family member in an unfamiliar city where identities are malleable. Balan’s character in Kahaani is underestimated because she is pregnant; Pannu’s is because she is blind and “a helpless mother.” Both of their searches reach their climax during a festival honoring a protective female deity: Durga in Kahaani, Chaumukhi Devi in Gandhari.
Yet Dhillon’s story lacks all the other things that Ghosh and his co-writers got right in Kahaani: magnificent world-building, ace character development, meaningful relationships, and twists that feel surprising but believable. Gandhari‘s world-building is terrible. Fight scenes and training montages take the place of character growth. Twists and secrets are used in quantity rather than quality.
Gandhari ends with Bollywood’s clearest indicator of a lack of narrative confidence: statistics. Three slides featuring data about the number of children trafficked in India are shown onscreen — as if the audience didn’t already realize that fictional stories draw inspiration from real life, and that, without the stats, we might feel there’s an acceptable number of children allowed to be trafficked. It undermines the emotional connections we were supposed to form with victims in the story.
The last of Gandhari‘s closing slides contains a quote so nonsensical that it provides the perfect ending to this awful film: “Behind every mother is a child…taken from a mother.” Exactly.
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