Bandit Queen [DVD]

No gorgeous dancing girls or glamourous mansions here. This is a brilliant production based on the real life story of an Indian legend, Phoolan Devi (Goddess Phoolan). This movie will give you a sense of what *most* of India is really like. The villages, the people, the living conditions, the caste system, the corruption.Phoolan Devi (Goddess Phoolan) is a flawed woman. Not because of her caste (low), or her tenacity (high), or her unfortunate life (extreme) but because she is human (like the rest of us). Her life is a rough lot, but she doesn't overcome with nobility or "working to change the system". She gets a gang of highwaymen and starts slaughtering all who represent her oppression (the oppression of the low caste women) and in the process becomes an unwitting heroine of the people. The men that used her, raped her, beat her, sullied her honor, and those that oppose her liberty, dignity and inherent worth as a female human being... either suffered her gun, her fist or those of her fellow outlaws. A Robin-hood story for India. The director (the versatile and brilliant Shekar Kapur) has made sure that you don't *always* feel pity for Phoolan, she is more than the sum of her victimizations. She is portrayed as strong, sassy, stubborn, flawed, struggling, striving to live, to heal, to love, to avenge. Each step of the way, she perservered and did what no one thought could be done.The gripe I have with this movie is that the director, never bothered to meet/consult with Phoolan (who was alive when the movie was made). This movie is not considered a definitive account of her life or a representation of the book (Phoolan's diary). It was not endorsed or approved by Phoolan in any way.For those wondering, Phoolan was truly a people's hero, eventually released from jail, elected to the Indian Parliment and then promptly/tragically assasinated a couple years ago. Her legend is worth knowing and this movie is a brilliant telling.

Product: The DVD was in good shape and it played well.Content:The Direction of the film starts well and sets up the characters well, however it runs out of steam two thirds of the way and then it ends abruptly. Its a great story and needs to be told. Im glad I saw this film.

This movie had a huge influence on me when I first watched it back in the early 2000s. At points it is hard to watch, but it is a good film. Phoolan Devi was a phenomenal woman, and although I know that she was not a fan of this film, I am glad that it led me to learn more about her.

This is a great movie. But be careful who you order it from. I first saw it on VHS and watched it several times. When I got it on DVD the translation was different. Also disc quality bad.

I saw this film *in a theater* and what I downloaded for streaming was clearly a heavily and sloppily censored version. I remember there was some controversy in India when this was first screened. Apparently censors got to the film which is extremely unfortunate. Curse words are clumsily silenced like U.S. broadcast television used to do to movies years ago, whole scenes are deleted, etc. If I Could get my money back, I would. Instead, I'll just warn you to *NOT* steam or buy this version. It's a travesty to the story, the filmmaker, and the actors.

The audio is in Hindi. The director's narrative is in English, but useless WRT the movie script. It has English subtitles. Buyers should know this.

Phoolan Devi is my hero since the 90's. I like this movie version better than the previous "Phoolan Devi: The Bandit Queen of India" which was filmed before her assassination in 2001. I highly recommend this more concise version of her life.

'Bandit Queen' is an arthouse update of the old 70s exploitation movies, in which a relentless focus on female suffering is justified by a pseudo-feminist revenge-plot. Taking us far away from the multi-coloured, song-and-dance Hindi spectaculars that are currently all the global range, Shekhar Kapur shows us an India riven by violence, poverty and a vicious caste system, where women are treated as subhuman. Before she even hits puberty, Phoolan Devi is married off to an older man (dowry: rusty bicycle and old goat) and raped when she expresses dissatisfaction at her social lot. When, some years later, she is nearly raped again by the landowner's son, it is she who is expelled from the community; she takes up with bandits and begins her first true love affair with the atypically sensitive Vikram, de facto leader while Babu Gujjar is in prison. When the latter is released, now turned police informer, he resents the pretensions of this lower-caste woman (called a goddess by her followers), has her gang-raped by all his men, and publicly stripped and humiliated. Having plumbed the lowest depths there are, Devi takes the blood-spattered road of vengeance, turning torture and massacre into a media-fuelled spectacle.When the director of 'Queen' later went on to make a film about Tudor-era royal conspiracies ('Elizabeth'), many were surprised because of the gaping differences in subject matter, but Kapur imposes his own concerns on the two movies: both feature outsider-women attempting to assert power in rigid male-dominated hierarchies; both emphasise the importance of costume, ritual and public spectacle in these societies, and the necessary reuninciation of sexuality and 'normal' femininity of strong women. In both, the apparently immovable class system represented in heavy buildings and landscape is made fluid and unstable by Kapur's gliding camerawork that seems to make walls melt away.But whereas 'Elizabeth' was an artistic success, 'Queen' seems to me a manipulative failure. This is mostly due to its reliance on a single source, the prison diaries of Devi, whereas the latter film created a web of conflicting viewpoints and omnipresent sense of surveillance. It is of course right to expose the atrocities embedded in the Indian caste system, and the slavery of women; it is right that a woman denied a voice in her own country (where the film was banned) should be heard. But the catalogue of unspeakable crimes inflicted on Devi has the effect of caricaturing the villains around her, turning her very real plight almost into a cartoon of repetitive violence. There is no nuance of social analysis here; instead the most simplistic behaviouralism - if such-and-such is inflicted on you, you will respond thus - depoliticising Devi's very real social transgression, reducing her to a mere melodramatic heroine, the 'woman wronged'. Having stayed so closely with its heroine and her experiences of abuse, when the film has to distance itself from her violence (which it must to avoid endorsing eye-for-an-eye brutality), it feels like a betrayal. By lingering on her suffering rather than her revenge, the latter is as abrupt, arbitrary and dreamlike as 'Lawrence Of Arabia', the vile murders shot with the same kind of exquisite taste and fussy staging, the political wholly subsumed to the deranged personal. I always get a bit queasy when men direct these kind of pseudo-feminist pictures - more interested in her body than her voice, 'Queen' can only continues the dehumanisation of its so-called heroine.