Instead of questioning the existence of Gandhari, it’s better to analyse the compromised nature of it.
The setting is the fictional town of Joypurra: fictional because there’s only so much Bollywood appropriation that Kolkata can handle.
The title refers to the mythological queen in the Mahabharata — the mother of the Kauravas — who blindfolds herself in solidarity with her blind husband.
The commentary is a last-ditch gimmick; what does a quote like “Behind every mother is a child…taken from the mother” even mean?
Is it the same as “Behind every bad film is a director…taken from the film?” The hollow ornamentation is everywhere.
Fortunately, I’m not young and brash anymore. I’m older and a little wiser, so constructive criticism is my poison of choice. Instead of questioning the existence of Gandhari, it’s better to analyse the compromised nature of it. The movie revolves around a young mother, Bani (Taapsee Pannu), who suffers temporary vision loss during the abduction of her daughter at a railway station, and then pretends to be blind to get to the bottom of this crime and not because she’s a raging Andhadhun fan. The setting is the fictional town of Joypurra: fictional because there’s only so much Bollywood appropriation that Kolkata can handle. Her nice-guy-to-a-fault husband, Gokul (a brown-faced Ishwak Singh), is on his own mission to track the girl down through a trafficking gang called Black Hole (the joke writes itself). The title refers to the mythological queen in the Mahabharata — the mother of the Kauravas — who blindfolds herself in solidarity with her blind husband. For the unacquainted, fear not, for Bani’s mentor spells this out (“you will do this as a mother, not a wife!”), so that Bani’s quest can scrape the bottom of the barrels of symbolism.
It starts as one story, becomes another, then another, before it settles on behaving like a manic vigilante-mom thriller whose pronouns seem to be she/twist. The commentary is a last-ditch gimmick; what does a quote like “Behind every mother is a child…taken from the mother” even mean? Is it the same as “Behind every bad film is a director…taken from the film?” The hollow ornamentation is everywhere. The town is full of culpable locals, lazy cops, a conspiracy that makes hide-and-seek games in school look clever, and traveling behrupiyas (impressionists) who become prime suspects: a meek attempt at capturing the distortions of social prejudice. Most of director Devashish Makhija’s independent-minded titles are located in this uncomfortable space — Joram, his last, was his most accomplished — but Gandhari feels like an exoticised imposter reimagined for fifth-screen viewing habits. Ironically, this is precisely the sort of mainstream vision that his nihilistic worlds used to humanise: from training montages to unlikely saviours to everyday bigotry.
