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A young "political" journalist who is desperate to save his work is probing the mysterious death of former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri. More than 50 years after his death, a film based on this principle is published at the very beginning of the Lok Sabha elections, far from the control of the Electoral Commission.
The goal of the director Vivek Agnihotri is behind Tashkent Files as clear as the day, but he spends 144 minutes trying to beat around the bush, seeming to look at various points of view, lest someone one calls it a partisan narrative. But thanks to the movie's screaming tone and unnecessarily dramatic performances, it's easy to see through the director's design. Tashkent Files poster.
Ragini Phule (Shweta Basu Prasad) is threatened by her editor that she will be transferred to the category "arts and culture" if she does not release an explosive story in nine days. A mysterious phone call, House of Cards draws his attention to the death of Shastri in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, the day after Pakistan signed a peace treaty with India in January 1966. , thus ending the Indo-Pakistan war. A secret committee is set up by the head of a political party, Shyam Sunder Tripathi (Mithun Chakravarty), to investigate the details surrounding one of the most controversial deaths in India's political history. (Although official documents indicate that the former prime minister died of a heart attack, several conspiracy theories suggest the opposite.)
The committee includes a social activist led by an NGO, Indira Joseph Roy (Mandira Bedi), a smoking historian Aiysha Ali Shah (Pallavi Joshi) loves to punctuate her sentences with the term "false news", a former RAW leader Anantha Suresh (Prakash Belwadi), judge at the retreat and scientist Gangaram Jha (Pankaj Tripathi). Each of the characters is even clbadified in categories of terrorism – intellectual, judicial, racist, political and even hold your breath, terrorism TRP – in Chakravarty's long theatrical monologue (no reason has been given for this).
Agnihotri does not say it. have the finesse to create a conspiracy thriller, not to mention the power we badociate with confined space dramas. The arguments in the committee room resemble an angry Facebook comment string that ultimately leads to no meaningful conclusion. Agnihotri resonates in phrases like anti-national, proxy, false information, secularism – almost everything that has made headlines in this country in the last five years.
Even though the narrative travels through the perilous territory of history and politics, logic takes a back seat. Ragini manages to travel to Tashkent, to meet a former KGB / CIA secret agent, Mukhtar (Vinay Pathak), to cry in front of the statue of Shastri and to return armed with more secret documents that she carries openly in the streets of Delhi . In the second half, the course of events seems too restrictive and everything ends up falling into a real climax. It's interesting to see how a film originally devoted to "honest journalists" later defines journalism as another name for politics.
The arcs of characters are as confusing as the perception of the concepts by the film. Ragini, who is initially accused of using false sources for his "trend" stories, becomes the searcher for the truth overnight. Secret Agent Mukhtar does not kill Ragini in one way or another, the goal of Naseeruddin Shah being that the ugly minister of House Natarajan seems unclear. What a waste of a good actor. We see Shah telling monologues like his wife Achint Kaur ("in a friendly appearance", as the generics say) and his golden retriever are in complete agreement. The performances of Chakravarty and Prasad remain exaggerated, as that seems to be the mandate that has been entrusted to them. In some parts, the film becomes a mixture of docu-drama woven into interviews with Shastri's grandson, Sanjay Nath Singh and former journalist Anuj Dhar.
Agnihotri extracts parallel medical reports and many highlighted portions of the Mitrokhin archives to indicate how. and maybe why, death has never been polled. He cites pbadages from the book by former Central Intelligence Agency agent Robert Crowley that sheds light on his alleged role. For those who have not read on Google the death of Shastri, the film will appear explosive, even if it is strident. Indian servers may soon see a resurgence in search on Google terms such as "Mitrokhin archives", "KGB" and "Tashkent". But as relevant as the subject of the film may be, The Tashkent Files do not go beyond the domain of documents on Google. And after more than two hours of research and examination, the story is hidden in a disclaimer stating that the authenticity of the (described) facts can not be proven.
In a meta-coup, if not a master stroke, Ragini asks Shyam Sunder Tripathi in the end, "What did you get by probing Shastri's death now, 53 years after that?" did it happen? " To which Mithun answers " mudda, " for the next elections. If this film had not been nested in the most important election in the history of India and contained its frantic narratives, its arguments might have taken for granted.
But for the moment, it seems to be only ", mudda ."
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Publication date: Apr 12, 2019 at 12:15 pm
| Last Updated: April 12, 2019 2:26 pm
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Date Updated: Apr 12, 2019 14:26:29 IST
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