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India's
``Ram'' revisits brutal period
Reuters
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PALM SPRINGS: India's official Oscar entry, ``Hey! Ram'' is
an expansive, at times deeply absorbing, portrait of a difficult
chapter in the country's history.
Written,
helmed and acted by acclaimed Indian star Kamal Haasan, pic
does a commendable job of personalizing the often bloody events
surrounding the division of India and Pakistan. While its
three-hour-plus running time, challenging subject matter and
considerable violence are deterrents to theatrical distribution,
this handsomely mounted film should find further festival
life and could eventually serve as a teaching tool alongside
Richard Attenborough's equally long and more accessible ``Gandhi.''
Though
its tone and re-creation of India's partition differ significantly
from those of the Attenborough pic, ``Hey! Ram'' ultimately
shares that film's message of peace and conciliation. The
tale of Saket Ram (Kamal Haasan), the man commissioned to
kill Mahatma Gandhi, ``Hey! Ram'' unfolds in flashback through
the eyes of the purported assassin.
Contempo
black-and-white footage of the dying Saket Ram, (looking,
quite deliberately, like the elder Gandhi himself), yields
to Ram's rich, colorful recollections. As a young archeologist
in 1946, Ram, then an apolitical Hindu, discusses the absurdity
of partition with his Muslim friend Amjad (Shah Rukh Khan).
When uprisings close their work site, Ram returns home to
his beloved wife, Aparna (Rani Mukharjee), in Calcutta. But
after riots grip the city and Aparna is brutally gang-raped
and murdered by Muslims, Ram is driven to seek revenge. Moved
to join a radical Hindu sect, he blames Gandhi's posture of
nonviolent civil disobedience for the Muslims' destruction
of his life and country.
Left emotionally
fractured by the events in Calcutta, Ram returns to his parents'
village. There he reluctantly agrees to his elders' requests
that he wed the young Mythili (Vasundra Das), whom he does
not love but grows to like. Although he is outwardly faithful
to Mythili, Ram secretly is more loyal to the radical sect,
which has chosen him to murder Gandhi.
Alternating
between the 1999 scenes in which the failing Ram, amid modern-day
riots, is rushed to the hospital, the flashbacks showcasing
Ram's struggle to balance political and personal responsibility
and his hallucinatory dream sequences, ``Hey! Ram'' often
feels more like an overlong kaleidoscopic collage than a drama.
But the dramatic sequences it does offer are well acted, compelling
and painful to watch. It's giving nothing away to say that
Ram chooses not to carry out the commission. Still, the climactic
events that lead him to make that choice are fascinating in
their psychological and moral complexity.
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