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Release date:
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October 21, 2016
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Director:
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Shivaji Lotan Patil
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Cast:
Language:
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Soha Ali Khan,
Vir Das, Deepraj Rana, Vineet Sharma, Lakhwinder Singh, Baby Anika, Baby
Arohi, Sezal Sharma, Daya Shankar Pandey, Aksshat Saluja
Hindi and Punjabi
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X happened. Then Y. And then Z. Director Shivaji Lotan Patil’s 31st
October is nothing more than a parade of facts about the anti-Sikh riots
that followed the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh
bodyguards on October 31, 1984. It is a perfect example of a film on a
sensitive issue completely bereft of imagination and subtlety.
31st
October stars Soha Ali Khan and Vir Das as Davinder
Singh and Tejinder Kaur, a happy Sikh couple living with their three children
in West Delhi. She is stern but loving, he a virtual saint. She feeds him and
argues with him about his excessive goodness. He walks an extra mile for his
Hindu neighbour. Everyone is nice to everyone and the world is all sweet and
honey and sugar ‘n’ spice ‘n’ all things nice until Beant Singh and Satwant
Singh shoot Indira at point-blank range.
The story opens on the morning of the PM’s murder and everything in the
early scenes is an
in-your-face set-up for what is to come. So, when we see Davinder run out of
blood pressure meds, we know he will later be weak without medication in the
middle of the pogrom. Since one of his little sons repeatedly asks him about
the significance of a Sikh’s long hair and turban, we know at some point they
will be driven to shear their heads to hide their identity from mobs.
As if the lack of nuance is not bad enough, 31st October
subjects us to mediocre production quality, third-rate dialogue writing and bad
acting. An array of terrible extras are rolled out for the bit parts and even
for significant satellite roles. Two irritating girls are cast as the lead
couple’s sons. Sezal Shah is unbearable as a shy young Sikh woman gazing
googly-eyed at a camera-wielding NRI. She cannot act for peanuts. Others are
worse – so bad in fact, that peanuts look profound in comparison.
I’ve always enjoyed watching Vir Das on screen, but his facial
expressions in 31st October make me wonder whether what I
have liked so far has been the suitability of his personality to comedy, the
genre that has dominated his filmography so far. This film is not funny, it is
not meant to be funny, and his expressions seem incongruous on the riot victim Davinder
whose Hindu friends put their lives on the line to save him and his family.
Soha Ali Khan does a fair job of his wife Tejinder who witnesses horrors that
no human being could possibly recover from. Although her Punjabi accent slips
on occasion, she makes their interactions tolerable.
The supporting cast contributes
greatly to this film’s overall air of tackiness. The only two who rise above
the mediocrity surrounding them are the always-reliable Deepraj Rana and Vineet
Sharma, playing men who risk everything so that Davinder, Tejinder and their
kids might live.
31st
October is based on the experiences of a Devender Pal
Singh Sachdeva and Tejinder Sachdeva. The credits call it “a tribute by
(producer) Harry Sachdeva”. In truth, this film does them an injustice. The
Sikhs who were targeted after Indira’s death from her bullet wounds, deserve a
better homage than this. What the producer and his director have put together
instead is a disservice to a community that is still being denied justice by
the authorities 32 years after humanity died on the streets of India’s Capital.
In the moments preceding the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in the US
during World War II in Michael Bay’s 2001 Hollywood film Pearl Harbor,
pretty little girls with golden curls are shown playing together in slow motion
against a picturesque backdrop. This is the kind of offensive stupidity that
distinguishes cliched films on violence from
the ones with depth. If those children were not
picture perfect, would their fate be less tragic or Japan’s actions less
condemnable?
31st
October slathers bowlfuls of treacle on to
the ordinary Sikhs who are attacked by rioters. Why? Would the butchery have
been any less inexcusable if the victims had not been uniformly fantastic
people, kind, gentle and dedicated to the service of others? In one scene, the suggestion
that some Sikhs celebrated after Mrs Gandhi’s killing is brushed aside. Why? Does
the filmmaker realise that by not acknowledging this element in the ugliness that
pervaded Delhi following her assassination,
he unwittingly implies that individuals who
lit candles and distributed sweets that day could rightfully be seen as a
justification for the slaying of innocent Sikhs?
Glossing over uncomfortable facts does
more harm than good to survivors, even when you do
so to please and appease them. Human beings do not have to be flawless or
belong to a flawless community to deserve the right to live, to not to be
robbed, to not be sexually violated, to not be forced to witness the
brutalisation of their loved ones.
This kind of self-defeating storytelling plays into the hands of people
like that chap in the hall where I watched this film who turned to another
during the interval and said: “Ab agar ek qaum ko lagega ki voh kuchh bhi
kar sakta hai, toh doosra qaum badla lega hi.” (Now if one community thinks
they can do anything, then the other is bound to take revenge.)
There are many
people like him in the world out there who are filled with hate. They are among
the million reasons why the human species’ history of massacres needs to be chronicled
repeatedly by cinema. Thousands of Sikhs were slaughtered, raped and driven out of their homes in the riots of
October-November 1984. Their story needs to be told with delicacy and
intelligence, not with the sloppiness and hollowness that are the hallmark of 31st
October.
Apart from the fact
that actors styled to resemble Congress politicians H.K.L. Bhagat,
Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar are shown engineering the riots, there is little worth
noting in this film.
Rating
(out of five stars): 1/2
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CBFC Rating (India):
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A
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Running time:
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102 minutes 18 seconds
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A
version of this review has also been published on Firstpost:
Poster
courtesy: Epigram Digital PR and
Magical Dreams Productions
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