After such a role call, Netaji itself feels like a bit of a disappointment. The attempt to retain elements of Bollywood song-and-dance in what otherwise presents itself as a sober—and, at 3 hours and 42 minutes, certainly epic—history produces a somewhat bewildering montage, in the course of which it grows increasingly difficult to distinguish hagiography from farce.
In the first scene, we are greeted by a Gandhi doppelgänger who puts Ben Kingsley to shame, but whose finest rhetoric (“my love is soft as a blossom and hard as a rock”) cannot get his errant pupil back on track.
En route to Kabul, we watch the “Mad Mullah” (as he is affectionately called) give a remarkably gratuitous performance that looks like something out of an Afghan remake of Jesus Christ Superstar.
A perfectly mustachioed Führer awaits in Berlin—where, though he is significantly less plausible than Bruno Ganz in the Academy Award-nominated Downfall (or even the toga-clad Heinz Schubert in the 1978 film Our Hitler), he delivers a spluttering invective against the “low races,” and proceeds to bestow upon Bose a toy model of the boat that will carry the latter around Africa “like Vasco da Gama”—and furnish ample opportunity, in turn, to bond with the spice-starved German crew over dal.
That Benegal has chosen a colorful subject is indisputable. Borders are crossed and re-crossed. There are more varieties of badly-accented English than one could ever imagine. We are shown Bose’s humanity, too—in an inexplicable anecdote in which the sudden presence of a small cat sends him, impervious though he may be to the threats of gunfire all around, into fidgeting and squeals.
However, what is perhaps most unsettling about Netaji is the juxtaposition of graphic violence with such peculiar jokes. It is unsettling to witness the readiness with which one dewy-eyed woman after another hands over food, coins or, in the most dramatic instance, an only son at the prompting of a few words from Bose and a crescendo of woodwinds (the bandshell must be behind the camp).
The film is disturbing because it does not spare us the fate that awaits the son—but also does not fully register its significance, does not make clear the connection between the nationalistic rapture of the mother and the explosions that will kill her last family member. In the end, Netaji does not sufficiently explore or evoke the ethical questions and complications that it should—particularly in a time when questions of violence and the deployment of violence in service of nation-statehood are so salient.
After Benegal’s talk, toward the end of the Question and Answer session, a graduate student posed a question to him about “reality as it really is”—and why he, along with other Indian filmmakers, failed to represent it. This drew a bemused chuckle from Benegal, who answered briefly “allusion, metaphor…all these things are to be used, surely. There has to be a place for imagination.”
As good postmodernists, we know that “reality as it really is” doesn’t really exist. The strength and the weakness of this film may be precisely the extent to which it is seduced by its protagonist’s own rhetoric and rhetorical figures. Benegal doesn’t fail to convey that he has great enthusiasm and passion for the subject he has chosen. But this passion seems, too often, like the zeal of a propagandist and not enough like the reflection of an artist open to the ethical difficulties of the “conflictual tapestry” he has chosen to represent.