[.ca] Bandit Queen - DVD

This movie is a lot different than the actual events.:
Shekhar Kapur is a great director. I am Indian so, I have seen over 75% of the Bollywood movies (biggest film industry in the world). Bandit Queen was very different yet entertaining. It had several sexual scenes and a lot cursing which is not normal for an Indian movie. I would like you to know that you will hear the curse word sisterf***er through out the entire movie. This is a curse word that is often used in India. The scene where Vikram was murdered is one that was different from the actual events. Phoolan wasn't even near the sleeping Vikram when he was shot to death. Phoolan had walked away from him to the river without her gun. We have to realize that she had this rage in her because she wanted to be treated the same as the upper castes. She was married off at the age of 11. Her husband raped her shortly after causing her never to have children. He was the one that kicked her out after humiliating her in front of his entire village and her entire village. She had no place to go. The movie portrayed her leaving him. Read the book by Mala Sen. The book is very detailed and you will see how the movie was altered. Phoolan Devi reported that Kapur did not have her permission to make this movie. She added that the massacre did not happen the way the movie portrayed. She also said that the movie made her out to be a demon rather than the Robin Hood heroin she actually was. She robbed the rich and gave to the poor. She had a heart. She felt this hate for the ones that did her wrong - the heartless upper caste men. Phoolan Devi went through so much in her short life before she was brutally murdered. To me she will live on through the teachings in India, books and movies. She changed the way Indians thought of a woman to be powerless. She not only proved herself - she proved that women too could rebel. That we women also had feelings and strength. After being on the run as a bandit and serving time in jail Phoolan went into politics. She married a wonderful man. They had a great marriage despite the fact that they could not have children. All I have to say after studying her life story is "Hail Phoolan Devi".

Powerful Societal Analysis:
Please note : This is a review of the VHS version of 1997 in English though I cannot remember whether it was English sound track or subtitles. A poignant true story no doubt also lived through by many other women. All men and particularly those from upper castes, should see it to learn how not to treat women.

One of the most moving films:
This is a great movie. A story of vengaince set against the savage backdrop of rural india, where little has changed since the dark ages. Like Islam, rural indians have little respect for women, who are often raped and forced into arranged marriages. This film was controversial and banned in India because it showed sex and rape. But the truth must be told. This woman was raped, not just once but many times over many years by powerful people and savage laymen. Phoolan Devi fought back though. Unlike all those Burkahized women in Afghanistan who happily were raped and beaten by their husbands(islam is a religion of 'peace' remmember), Ms. Devi rounded up a whole village upper castes and murdered them all. This was not a savage act, this was revenge. It was in this village where she had been gang raped by the local leaders and forced into humiliation. These savage rural people got what they deserved and this movie shows this great awful tragic tale. The film is the story of heroism, and of a womans struggle, one that is played out in many backwards third world countries. The film is very realistic and does not cut corners in portraying the rape scenes. Many will be turned away because they 'cant handle watching rape'. Well wake up and watch because to understand revenge you must watch!

Good Movie But Lousy Rebel:
The only thing that gripes me about this movie is Phoolan's incompetence as a rebel. Take that second time Vikram gets shot for example. Why didn't Phoolan pick her rifle up and shoot back at the snipers? I think the answer is obvious. Phoolan doesn't know how to fight against armed opponents. All she can do is massacre helpless civillians (which she did).

Almost unwatchable.:
'Bandit Queen' is an arthouse update of the old 70s exploitation movies, in which a relentless focus on female suffering is justified by a pseudo-feminist revenge-plot. Taking us far away from the multi-coloured, song-and-dance Hindi spectaculars that are currently all the global range, Shekhar Kapur shows us an India riven by violence, poverty and a vicious caste system, where women are treated as subhuman. Before she even hits puberty, Phoolan Devi is married off to an older man (dowry: rusty bicycle and old goat) and raped when she expresses dissatisfaction at her social lot. When, some years later, she is nearly raped again by the landowner's son, it is she who is expelled from the community; she takes up with bandits and begins her first true love affair with the atypically sensitive Vikram, de facto leader while Babu Gujjar is in prison. When the latter is released, now turned police informer, he resents the pretensions of this lower-caste woman (called a goddess by her followers), has her gang-raped by all his men, and publicly stripped and humiliated. Having plumbed the lowest depths there are, Devi takes the blood-spattered road of vengeance, turning torture and massacre into a media-fuelled spectacle. When the director of 'Queen' later went on to make a film about Tudor-era royal conspiracies ('Elizabeth'), many were surprised because of the gaping differences in subject matter, but Kapur imposes his own concerns on the two movies: both feature outsider-women attempting to assert power in rigid male-dominated hierarchies; both emphasise the importance of costume, ritual and public spectacle in these societies, and the necessary reuninciation of sexuality and 'normal' femininity of strong women. In both, the apparently immovable class system represented in heavy buildings and landscape is made fluid and unstable by Kapur's gliding camerawork that seems to make walls melt away. But whereas 'Elizabeth' was an artistic success, 'Queen' seems to me a manipulative failure. This is mostly due to its reliance on a single source, the prison diaries of Devi, whereas the latter film created a web of conflicting viewpoints and omnipresent sense of surveillance. It is of course right to expose the atrocities embedded in the Indian caste system, and the slavery of women; it is right that a woman denied a voice in her own country (where the film was banned) should be heard. But the catalogue of unspeakable crimes inflicted on Devi has the effect of caricaturing the villains around her, turning her very real plight almost into a cartoon of repetitive violence. There is no nuance of social analysis here; instead the most simplistic behaviouralism - if such-and-such is inflicted on you, you will respond thus - depoliticising Devi's very real social transgression, reducing her to a mere melodramatic heroine, the 'woman wronged'. Having stayed so closely with its heroine and her experiences of abuse, when the film has to distance itself from her violence (which it must to avoid endorsing eye-for-an-eye brutality), it feels like a betrayal. By lingering on her suffering rather than her revenge, the latter is as abrupt, arbitrary and dreamlike as 'Lawrence Of Arabia', the vile murders shot with the same kind of exquisite taste and fussy staging, the political wholly subsumed to the deranged personal. I always get a bit queasy when men direct these kind of pseudo-feminist pictures - more interested in her body than her voice, 'Queen' can only continues the dehumanisation of its so-called heroine.