Downton meets David Lean for the bloody birth of India
Film
Viceroy’s House
12A cert, 106 min
Dir Gurinder Chadha Starring Hugh Bonneville, Gillian Anderson, Michael Gambon, Manish Dayal, Huma Qureshi, Simon Callow, Om Puri
The British-Indian director Gurinder Chadha wasn’t born when the supposedly peaceful transfer of power from Britain to India took place in 1947, but the ensuing horrors of Partition engulfed her Sikh relatives. The division of the country between religious factions brought about the largest mass migration in human history: 14 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were displaced.
Best known for crowd-pleasing comedies such as Bend It Like Beckham (2001), Chadha has been absent from our screens since her 2010 neo-Ealing farce It’s a Wonderful Afterlife, a garish fiasco over which at least seven veils should be swiftly drawn. She has upped her game massively for Viceroy’s House, which revisits the build-up to Partition. The access point is Downton- esque – the upstairs/ downstairs intrigue in the grand New Delhi residence that housed India’s last viceroys, up to the final one, Lord “Dickie” Mountbatten.
Hugh Bonneville plays this glamorous minor royal with a dashing variation on his stiff upper lip, and a determination to keep India united. The script accentuates how out of his depth Mountbatten would become; in fact, it posits him, perhaps controversially, as a stooge for a secret Partition plan his taskmasters had been preparing for many years.
As Edwina Mountbatten, Gillian Anderson has come up with a curious, stiff walk to match her necessarily strangulated accent, and builds a good sense of how much practical energy this Vicereine devoted to the crisis.
There’s only so much in this desperately involved historical saga that Chadha and her screenwriters are able to grapple with, of course. But the focus isn’t always judicious.
The reason for a sketchy take on the Mountbattens, and the Nehru-Jinnah-Gandhi horse-trading, is to save space for a star-crossed love story between Jeet (Manish Dayal), one of Dickie’s new Hindu servants, and his hoped-for Muslim bride Aalia (Qureshi, see interview left). Chadha has saved a big chunk of her budget for the end, which must convey the chaos, scale and bloodshed of this upheaval while knitting the story’s threads together. She channels her inner David Lean with a full-blooded, matinee shamelessness that takes you aback.