Viceroy’s House
VICEROY’S HOUSE, not rated, The Screen, 3 chiles
Gurinder Chadha has written and directed some of the screen’s most successful comedies exploring the world of Hindu and Sikh refugees living in Great Britain, beginning with Bhaji on the Beach back in 1993, but most notably the smash hit Bend It Like Beckham in 2002. Now she turns to more serious storytelling with a new picture that took her several years to get made.
Viceroy’s House recreates the events surrounding the 1947 partition of India — after almost a century under British rule — and the subsequent creation of Pakistan: There were now two fully independent nations. The film offers an “upstairs, downstairs” take on the historic occasion, set inside the palace occupied by Lord Louis Mountbatten, the great-grandson of Queen Victoria and the last British viceroy assigned to India.
On the one hand, we see Mountbatten (Hugh Bonneville) as he cajoles, dines, and wheels and deals with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the head of the All-India Muslim League, who orchestrated freedom for Pakistan. Mountbatten is brash and bullish, described as a man who “could charm a vulture off a corpse.” But he’s also a bit shallow — at least compared to his wife, Edwina. She’s played with a surprising British accent and plenty of verve by Gillian Anderson, the American-born star of the long-running TV series The X-Files.
While the Mountbattens keep the upstairs churning, an unconventional love story unfolds downstairs, involving Jeet (Manish Dayal), a Hindu manservant, and Aalia (Huma Qureshi), a headstrong Muslim woman employed as a translator in the palace. Through these two we come to understand how the partitioning affected everyday citizens, leading to the migrations of millions of displaced refugees fleeing India proper for the new Muslim country of Pakistan. Many lives were lost in transit, as rioting, religious strife, and sectarian conflict racked both homelands. Quite aptly, historian William Dalrymple described the tragedy as “mutual genocide,” akin to the upheavals that tore apart the United States during the Civil War.
There’s an awful lot of back story to digest here, and the film sometimes has to skim and race ahead to stay afloat. We don’t see much of Gandhi, for instance, but his story is already well known from the 1982 Oscar-winning movie by Richard Attenborough. Also, while we’re shown how frank Edwina Mountbatten can be, Viceroy’s House doesn’t touch at all upon the long-whispered rumors of her gallivanting behind the scenes with Nehru.
Chadha scores her best shots with the late Bollywood actor Om Puri, who appears as Aalia’s blind, fiery father, radicalized after years jailed under the British yoke. Chadha also gives us a touching epilogue, recalling her own Sikh grandmother being uprooted in 1947. Chadha herself never lived in India. She was born in Kenya, daughter of a Sikh immigrant, and from there moved to London.
The rousing musical score is by A.R. Rahman, the composer who shot to fame with Slumdog Millionaire. The script is balanced, but also quite cheeky and colorful. And no matter how brutal the story turns, the palace is always a marvel to behold. The historic viceroy’s house is now the President of India’s residence; filming actually took place in a combination museum and hotel in Rajasthan, where you can stay for as little as about $40 a night. — Jon Bowman