BANDIT QUEEN Movie Review

The true story of Phoolan Devi, a relentlessly abused woman from a low caste who almost single-handedly staged a bloody revolt against the male-dominated, oppressive system that tried to beat her into submission. That revolt—which turned the real Phoolan into the legendary folk hero of the title—is not simply implied or referred to offscreen; it's shown in the same graphic detail as the abuse and rapes that Phoolan and so many other women were subjected to. The violence in Bandit Queen is loud, bloody, and relentless. Though it's shocking at first, the non-stop parade of battles, massacres, and wholesale slaughter ultimately produces something approaching an anesthetizing effect; we find ourselves almost less interested in seeing justice done than in seeing the butchery simply end. Nevertheless, this nightmarish vision of the fruits generated by the now-illegal but deeply entrenched roots of the caste system has a primal power that steamrollers over a lot of reservations one might have about Bandit Queen as a film. It's a tough movie to watch, but a far tougher one to forget.

NEXT STOP … Bhaji onhe Beach, Fire, Switchblade Sisters

1994 119m/C GB IN Seema Biswas, Nirmal Pandey, Manoj Bajpai, Raghubir Yadav, Rajesh Vivek, Govind Namdeo; D: Shekhar Kapur; W: Mala Sen; C: Ashok Mehta; M: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Roger White. VHS, LV HMK