Showbiz / Film Review: Unfreedom

Film Review: Unfreedom

Showbiz May 28, 2015

by Matthew Currie

Brutal Banned-in-India Drama Has an Impressive Vision but Spotty Execution.

The first thing most people will hear about first-time director Raj Amit Kumar’s Unfreedom is that it was banned in India — in no small part because the film's North American poster advertises that very fact. Upon watching the movie, which opens on full-frontal nudity and proceeds to graphic sex, gore and brutality, it’s difficult to imagine that Kumar or anyone else working on the picture could have envisioned any other outcome. It’s clear from the outset that the goal here is to provoke.

Set simultaneously in New Delhi and New York, the film cuts back and forth between two different stories. In India, a closeted lesbian named Leela (Preeti Gupta) abducts and goes on the run with Sakhi (Bhavani Lee), her activist American lover, to avoid being trapped in an arranged marriage to a man. All the while, they're both pursued by Leela's policeman father (Adil Hussain) and his repressive cohorts.

In the Big Apple, a newly arrived terrorist named Husain (Bhanu Uday) is tasked with abducting prominent intellectual Fareed (Victor Banerjee). Husain intends to make an example out of this blasphemer by making him recant his moderate beliefs on video, but instead, he finds himself locked in a long, exceedingly bloody battle of wills that will open up deep-seated emotional scars in captive and captor alike.

The best thing that I can say about Unfreedom is that it’s an admirable attempt to lay bare the tyrannical injustice and oppression that free-thinkers and non-conformists are forced to endure. The brutality on display in Husain's story in particular toe the line of so-called torture-porn horror films. But here, those tools are deployed not for macabre titillation but to expose and enrage. It's an incendiary work designed to make us gaze directly at the oft-unexamined ugliness that society allows to occur.

It's a bold endeavour on Kumar’s part, and generally speaking, the key onscreen players acquit themselves well. Particularly impressive are old pros Hussain and Banerjee, but also young Gupta, who radiates vulnerability, longing and eventually strength in her character’s darkest hours without speaking a word.

Unfortunately, Unfreedom simply isn't a compellingly told story. Too often, characters come off as little more than ciphers, delivering clunky, didactic speeches about the nature of war, religion, love and freedom; Kumar’s not so much telling a story as he is shouting it in our faces. Moreover, Husain's story, which throughout strains to make connections between the young terrorist's tragic childhood and his present situation, gets more contrived and less believable as it unravels.

The graphic, uncompromising nature of the sex and torture scenes are indeed striking, but they're packaged within a film that lacks the nuance and subtlety to make us invest in either narrative or its characters. Unfreedom may provoke, but it never engages.

^{_{Feature Image Courtesy of Dark Frames/focusnews.com}}

Matthew Currie

Author

A long-standing entertainment journalist, Currie is a graduate of the Professional Writing program at Toronto’s York University. He has spent the past number of years working as a freelancer for ANOKHI and for diverse publications such as Sharp, TV Week, CAA’s Westworld and BC Business. Currie ...

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Film Review: Unfreedom

by Matthew Currie

Brutal Banned-in-India Drama Has an Impressive Vision but Spotty Execution.

Matthew Currie

COMMENTS

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