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Main Atal Hoon movie review: Despite Pankaj Tripathi’s inspired portrayal, the film is reduced to a rah-rah hagiography of former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and fails to do justice to his multiple facets.

That ‘Main Atal Hoon’ would be a stroke-by-stroke retelling of the high points of an illustrious political personage comes as no surprise. But the fact that Ravi Jadhav, the director of the marvellous musical ‘Natrang’, reduces this bio-pic of India’s 10th Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to such a rah-rah hagiography is a deep disappointment: the poet-turned-politician, a staunch follower of the RSS, and a committed believer in the concept of the Hindu Rashtra, was a colourful, charismatic character, and this film doesn’t do justice to his multiple facets.

For a section of today’s audience, just the fact that the film — more a step-by-step handbook of how the Hindu Right came to power rather than a deep, layered dive into Atal Bihari’s life and times — exists, will be cause for celebration. Coming as it does, right before the Ram Mandir inauguration, with the Lok Sabha elections down the road, the timing, for the ruling dispensation, can’t be more perfect.

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But what we would have liked is a much more rigorous, demanding biography: how did Atal, the schoolboy who became tongue-tied on a stage, become such a skilled orator? How did one little lecture from his father (Piyush Mishra) do the job? How did young Atal become a member of his ‘shakha’, learning to twirl the lathi, while being imbued by the ideology of the Sangh? He became a young man when India was still under the British Raj, and patriotism was in the air, but what stirred his blood, other than his beautiful classmate Rajkumari (Ekta Kaul)?

Pankaj Tripathi, In and As Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was born to play this part. His command over Hindi, and the rhythms of his speech are so hypnotic that we get swept away, but even an actor of Tripathi’s calibre can’t do much with such a reductive script. What we could have got is a rounded portrait of a budding neta who was instrumental in shaping the early Jan Sangh, the formation of the short-lived Janata Party, and the birth of the current BJP. Despite the fact that he never budged from his early moorings, and that his ‘mukhauta’ never shifted, he managed to straddle political divides, and became an enormously popular leader and statesmen, as the Indian foreign minister, and prime minister.

What we get, instead, is a one-sided account of those tumultuous years when India was being formed into a republic, where the film constantly reminds us that the ruling Congress, under Nehru and Indira, couldn’t do anything about the widespread ‘gareebi’ and the ‘bhukhmari’; that corruption in the highest places (a reference to Sanjay Gandhi’s Maruti project and the nasbandi drive comes up) had eaten up the innards of the nation. While some of that was indeed true, to completely blank out everything else that took root, makes this, quite simply, unjustly mealy-mouthed.

So enamoured is the film with its primary subject that all other figures within its own party who rose to prominence around that time are turned into ciphers: Lal Krishna Advani ( Raja Sevak) is the most unfairly dealt with, becoming ‘the friend’ who introduces the hard-working Vajpayee to the magic of cinema, and little else; the actors playing Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj, Pramod Mahajan barely get a look-in, as Vajpayee’s highlights — the nuclear bomb, the Lahore bus, and the Kargil war — get maximum play. Atal’s relationship with Rajkumari and her family, and the menage they created, is so sanitised– being turned into more his duty, than passion– that you cannot take it seriously, even if Kaul is quite lovely, leaving quite an impact.

What we are left with is Tripathi, who nails Vajpayee’s characteristic neck-shake and flinging-of-the-hands, while orating in and out of Parliament. He is more character than caricature, and that’s the only reason to sit through this two and a half hour film.

Main Atal Hoon movie cast: Pankaj Tripathi, Piyush Mishra, Raja Sevak, Ekta Kaul, Daya Shankar Pandey, Pramod Pathak, Payal Nair, Harshad Kumar
Main Atal Hoon movie director: Ravi Jadhav

This news was originally published on The Indianexpress

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