A very well-made film in a genre that Hindi films usually do not even attempt. It has elements of The Odessa File starring Jon Voight that I saw many years ago, and elements of Twelve Angry Men remade as Ek Ruka Hua Faisla, about a jury debating whether a defendant is guilty or not. Here, the subject is the shadowy circumstances around the death of Lal Bahadur Shastri, India's former Prime Minister, that happened at Tashkent.
Though the end abruptly points fingers at a political personality, making it look as though it is a propaganda film in the times of a general election, that does not take away the fact that it is gripping from the word Go. You can discount the last five minutes if you don't like those. Throughout the film, though, the entire political class is blamed for whatever the main argument is- a citizen's right to be informed about the goings-on in a democracy. The Cold War and the dirty tricks of CIA and KGB also come out starkly.
Shweta Basu Prasad excels in her role of an intrepid journalist, and is supported ably by a good supporting cast- Mithun Chakrabarty and Naseeruddin Shah being the major ones, and Pankaj Tripathi, Pallavi Joshi and Mandira Bedi among the others.
I liked it as a film, in spite of a possible propagandist angle, as mentioned earlier.
Though the end abruptly points fingers at a political personality, making it look as though it is a propaganda film in the times of a general election, that does not take away the fact that it is gripping from the word Go. You can discount the last five minutes if you don't like those. Throughout the film, though, the entire political class is blamed for whatever the main argument is- a citizen's right to be informed about the goings-on in a democracy. The Cold War and the dirty tricks of CIA and KGB also come out starkly.
Shweta Basu Prasad excels in her role of an intrepid journalist, and is supported ably by a good supporting cast- Mithun Chakrabarty and Naseeruddin Shah being the major ones, and Pankaj Tripathi, Pallavi Joshi and Mandira Bedi among the others.
I liked it as a film, in spite of a possible propagandist angle, as mentioned earlier.
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