Three years to the day after the first Covid-19 nationwide lockdown was announced, writer-director-producer Anubhav Sinha’s film Bheed, now in theaters, uses a line from Buffalo Soldier by Bob Marley and the Wailers to emphasize the value of knowing “your history” and being aware of “where you come from.” Bheed, a film shot entirely in black and white, does indeed make a point about where we have come from and where we are going as a nation torn by disparities by providing a fictional account of the impact of the pandemic and (especially) of the total nationwide lockdown on migrant workers and daily wage earners left to fend for themselves. Scroll to read Bheed Movie Review.
Bheed Movie Review
The movie conveys the suffering of the voiceless and oozes sympathy and empathy for those doomed to live on the periphery of a society that doesn’t give a damn. It makes use of the aftermath of a sudden shutdown to reflect on the privileges and injustices we take for granted.
Bheed begins with a terrifying scene of a small group of weary, faceless individuals strolling down a rail track.
The night’s calm is broken by the loud cry of a train whistle as they recline to sleep. The sound soon combines with human wails, serving as an unsettling precursor to what is to follow.
Bheed is a reminder of a time when the nation’s working class was thrown into the fire without even the barest of backup plans. The deplorable spectacle that took place in our towns and on our highways revealed our general disregard for those who are exploited, marginalized, and conditioned to accept their terrible situation.
The movie is a vivid account of many divisions, including those between the government and the governed, the law and the average person, the rich and the poor, the privileged and the downtrodden, and the sensitive and the callous, which are greatly exacerbated when the country is confronted with a pandemic-scale crisis.
Bheed is a gritty movie that urges the wealthy to shake off their ingrained complacency in addition to being brave act. It demonstrates how a disaster can devastate a society in which the vulnerable are routinely marginalized and minorities are treated differently.
The fracture lines are starkly and austerely exposed in the script by Anubhav Sinha, Saumya Tiwari, and Sonali Jain. Soumik Mukherjee’s restless but inconspicuous camerawork and Atanu Mukherjee’s editing rhythms, which have been slightly muted by excisions ordered by the censor board, emphasize how sharp the images are.
Notwithstanding the omissions, Bheed’s argument is strong enough. Bheed does a great job of conveying a tale – in fact, several stories – that simply needed to be told. A movie can’t, of course, change the way a country thinks.
Plot
Bheed, a movie about desperate people trying to return to their villages as state borders are sealed and the police are ordered to stop them, may feel overly simplistic in some places because it must interpret complex issues in simple, immediately relatable terms, but it never once seems less than timely.
Sinha paints a picture of a world where the poor and the powerless, regardless of their caste identities, are left to fend for themselves with the help of a fantastic ensemble cast that is perfectly in line with the goal of the film.
The purpose of mixing up caste and power hierarchies is to pit a Dalit policeman against a Brahmin watchman. Watchman Balram Trivedi, the former, is the son of the village priest (Pankaj Kapur). His social capital is forfeited.
The officer is Surya Kumar Singh, a low-caste officer who goes by a different family name to hide his identity. He is tasked with applying the state’s will to the men (and their families) who have set out on the road without knowing where it could take them.
Bheed is a thematically and artistically related work to Sinha’s Mulk and Article 15. Similar to Mulk, it addresses Islamophobia by bringing up the slander directed towards the Tablighi Jamaat during the pandemic. When he gives food packages to stranded and malnourished migrants, a group of Muslim men led by an elderly guy with a beard experience shame.
The background of the male lead, who has directly experienced horrors, conveys the effects of caste violence on the defenseless in the way of Article 15. In both movies, Bheed relies on a variety of news report articles to create its story.
It’s fitting that Lotus Oasis, a vacant retail center, serves as a metaphor for the bubble where the police and a man who decides to use force in his fight against hunger reach a deadlock.
Almost all of the action in the movie takes place in and around this mall. Buses and other vehicles are stopped in their tracks as the police hastily erect barricades on the road outside the building, which is completely out of place. When tensions rise and tempers flare, the impassioned conversations that follow end in failure.
Surya is appointed the police post in charge by Circle Officer Subhash Yadav (Ashutosh Rana), bypassing Ram Singh (Aditya Shrivastava), a decision with a variety of outcomes. The girl Surya loves, Renu Sharma (Bhumi Pednekar), a medical intern dispatched to the scene with test kits and medications, represents another caste divide that Surya must cross.
A distant relative of a minor politician thinks that the barricades are for the underprivileged. He thinks that he and his guys are above the law. A woman (Dia Mirza) is frantically trying to get to her daughter’s hostel before her estranged husband does.
Aditi Subedi plays a young girl who is trying to escape her drunken father (Omkar Das Manikpuri). A television reporter named Vidhi Prabhakar (Kritika Kamra) struggles to do her work amid the chaos. She is perplexed by the way things are turning out.
The actors create an uncanny physical and emotional fusion with the setting of the movie. Outstanding performances from Rajkummar Rao and Pankaj Kapur raise the impact of the movie. No less effective are the other cast members, particularly Ashutosh Rana, Bhumi Pednekar, Dia Mirza, and Aditya Srivastava.
“We are a diseased society,” a cynical photojournalist character declares. Bheed emphasizes how this apprehension could not be unfounded. It claims that not just viruses are to blame for our problems. The problem is considerably more pervasive. Anubhav Sinha is not afraid to look the rot in the eye. Is there anything more thrilling than a director who takes a stand and is recognized?
