Much more had happened and chronicled which needs to be told and retold.īhandarkar has taken every care that the movie does not hurtle into a documentary and he succeeds only to that extent. It just scratches the surface and no attempt is made to delve deep. Even in this movie, a blinkered view has been presented with many other aspects and sections being completely blanked out. ‘India Lockdown’ can not be termed as a definitive work on the pandemic but certainly, it is the first and major work on this subject. However, Shweta, Prateik, and Sai shine bright. Therefore, performance-wise too everyone does justice to their characters with no one overshadowing the other. But in ‘India Lockdown’, he focuses more on what the society went through than just individuals. Strong female characters have been a specialty of Bhandarkar. No attempt has been made to over dramatize the trauma and angst. The story, screenplay, and dialogues by Joshi, Sah, and Bhandarkar are straightforward and simple, rather simplistic. In another, the family of four is forced to eat rotten bananas. In one instance he is shown even rummaging through a dustbin to find food. During their walk back home, men want to take advantage of Phoolmati thus unmasking how people behave even during tragedies. It is their travel travails that will make the audience relive the ordeal thousands of other guest workers underwent. They struggle to make both ends meet and hence decide to walk to their hometown. Their lives get seriously impacted as the duo is left jobless. Nageshwar Rao asks her to stop coming to work as society decides not to allow maids due to Coronavirus. However, it is the story of his house help, Phoolmati that emerges as the main plot and tugs at the heartstrings. The second story is of an old father Nageshwar Rao who is trying his level best to reach Hyderabad from Mumbai but is not able to do so as flights and trains are not operational. They did not face a dearth of anything but were solving their own first-world problems. Moon’s track tells us how the well-heeled were doing. We have guest workers Madhav (Prateik Babbar) and Phoolmati (Sai Tamhankar), then Nageshwar Rao (Prakash Belawadi) and his daughter who is expecting her first child, a pilot Moon (Ahana Kumara) who has been grounded and a sex worker Mehrunissa played by Shweta Basu Prasad. Hence teaming with Amit Joshi and Aradhana Sah, Bhandarkar picks four stories from different strata of society to show us how their lives were hit. However, all those who have lived to tell the tale of the pandemic can easily jog their memory and recall those trying times when people ran out of ration, lost their jobs, and had to walk miles to reach their homes. Three years down the line the maverick filmmaker Madhur Bhandarkar decided to look back at that period when everyone was forced to coop and bring some lockdown stories to life again.Īt the start of the ‘India Lockdown’, there is a disclaimer warning the audience that these stories are a work of fiction and any resemblance to the living or dead is purely coincidental. Thanks to Coronavirus, words like lockdown and quarantine entered the everyday lexicon of the common man. Exactly three years ago a new virus came into being and wreaked havoc.
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