Movie Review HINDI PM N ARENDRA M ODI V IVEK O BEROI HAMS HIS WAY THROUGH AN UNWITTINGLY FARCICAL , COMICAL HAGIOGRAPHY By Anna MM Vetticad Special to India Parent Magazine
Rating: 0.25/5 Starring: Vivek Oberoi (Credited Here As Vivek Anand Oberoi), Manoj Joshi, Zarina Wahab, Suresh Oberoi, Prashant Narayanan, Darshan Kumar, Boman Irani, Anjan Shrivastav, Akshat R. Saluja, Yatin Karyekar, Rajendra Gupta Director: Omung Kumar B (Note: Our software does not accommodate less than 0.25 stars in the rating graphic. The actual rating given to this film by our crit- ic is 0 stars.) This month’s new Bollywood release, director Omung Kumar B’s PM Narendra Modi, is not a biography. It is an unwittingly farcical, comical hagiography of Narendra Modi and the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), and even that is a euphemistic description. To put it simply, this is a highly
and the embarrassingly bad Aishwarya Rai Bachchan-star- rer Sarbjit (2016). PM Narendra Modi falls into the so-bad- it-could-be-fun category, except that it is not fun at all – it is, instead, an insult to viewer intelligence and viewer knowl- edge. "Modi ek insaan nahin, ek soch hai (Modi is not a person, Modi is a way of thinking/a concept),” says the protagonist himself at one point. Aur Modi ke baare mein soch badalne ke liye, to change the thinking about Modi, the screenplay – co- written by Anirudh Chawla and the leading man, Vivek Anand Oberoi – runs facts through a carefully chosen sieve and presents a new, rewritten history so far removed from recorded reality, that it bears little resemblance to the actu- al Modi. In that sense, PM Narendra Modi reminded me of a scene in last year’s Malayalam feature Kammara Sambhavam, in which the hero watches a PR film about his life and does not recognise himself on screen. Things that did not happen in Modi’s life are in this film shown to have happened: he is shown being arrested during the Emergency, the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is shown praising him to the press during the 2002 riots, in the run-up to the 2014 election Modi is shown vol- unteering to do a live interview with a hostile TV journalist before an audience and acing it. In the face of such liberties with facts involving major historical events, all PM Narendra Modi’s other follies and flaws – the word “grate- ful” being spelt as “greatful” in the opening acknowledge- ments, the lazy caricature of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Modi’s corrupt government col- league in Gujarat, the false suggestion that Modi never married, other monumental exaggerations and misrepre- sentations in the screenplay, Hitesh Modak’s overbearing background score and the overall tackiness of the narrative – pale into insignificance. It is worth mentioning here that the aforementioned hostile journalist is a stooge of a corrupt industrialist called Aditya Reddy, played by Prashant Narayanan. Three ene- mies are very clearly marked out by PM Narendra Modi: Pakistan, the news media and, through the medium of the Reddy character, the dark-skinned self-serving south
Vivek Anand Oberoi in a still from PM Narendra Modi
fictionalised account of the present Indian prime minister’s life. Omung Kumar’s recall value so far has come from the vastly superior Priyanka Chopra-starrer Mary Kom (2014)
50 www.indiaparentmagazine.org
May 2019
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