Bastar-The Naxal Story Movie Review: A propagandist film that lacks any merit

Bastar-The Naxal Story is all about the shock value. Through its mind-numbing 126 minutes, this disturbing film shows us violence in order to stir us against the Chhattisgarh naxal-security force conflict in favour of the system. The modus operandi is simple: Show hands being cut and heads being butchered, and then keep making the claim that a national university with a bunch of professors—authors and journalists—is responsible for all the blood-spatter. The film never really steps into the heart of the conflict, which has many facets, with its only agenda aimed at vilifying the country’s intelligentsia.

Directed by: Sudipto Sen

Starring: Adah Sharma, Yashpal Sharma, Indira Tiwari, Raima Sen, Kishore Kadam, Shilpa Shukla and Anangsha Biswas

At the centre of the film is a mother-son story. A tribal family is devastated when the father is killed for hoisting the national flag in the Naxalite-dominated part of the forest. He is sliced in front of his family, with his wife and daughter asking for mercy. His teenage son is not to be seen; apparently, he is attracted towards the ways of the Naxalites and is made to believe that what happened to his father was his fate. As the mother boils up with vengeance, the son joins the enemy group. Standing between the two is IPS officer Neerja Madhavan (Adah Sharma) who is revealed to be pregnant, and who is made to join the force tasked with killing the Naxalite leader.

Rather strangely, the film has no time to spend on the mother-son story. Instead, by taking the detour into a court case about an internationally acclaimed author, Vanya Roy (Raima Sen) and a professor, who are accused of having Maoist links, the film makes its intentions quite clear. In a scene, the book, Walking with Comrades, is on a bed. All of this seems like a bad film interpretation of what’s happening in the real world, with intellectuals, activists and professors being accused of being “conspirators”. This film goes a step further and accuses the Supreme Court of not acting on them. The conspiracy it suggests is that the intellectuals control the media, Bollywood, and every tenet of public space, against the state. And on and on it goes. Given its over-eagerness to peddle its agenda and its lack of cinematic merit, it’s quite hard to suspend disbelief about it.

The protagonist, Adah Sharma, is largely unimpressive resorting to the same stoic, angry face throughout the film, with the eyes occasionally bulging out whenever she gets a bit emotional. The only ray of hope in the middle of the mess is the honest performance of Yashpal Sharma as the prosecution lawyer and Kishore Kadam as the activist working for rehabilitating tribals. Their skills don’t find the right release in this film though.

In a confrontation scene between the Naxalites and the CRPF officers, a red tint is added to the eyes of the rebels. At first, I thought I was seeing things, but then it was clear. Emerging out of the dark, the Naxalites are made to seem like predators, hungry for blood—and perhaps the filmmaker isn’t convinced that the politics is strong enough that they opt for a straightforward tactic to dehumanise them. In this film, they are all evil creatures who like nothing better than to cut and torture humans. There is no room for gray. In the battle between loud background music and incessant gunfire, the massacre isn’t of innocent tribals. It’s of humanisation and empathy.