Director: Shyam Benegal
Writers: Atul Tiwari, Shama Zaidi
Cast: Arifin Shuvoo, Nusrat Imrose Tisha, Nusraat Faria, Tauquir Ahmed, Riaz, Shahidul Alam Sachchu
Duration: 178 mins
Available in: Theatres
As a film critic, it doesn’t get more disheartening than watching a terrible movie by a pioneering director. Especially if the name alone conveys the iconography of a culture. The last thing you want to do is criticize the most basic elements: The cosplay-level performances, dated visual effects, silly wigs, Wikipedia-lite structure, history-for-dummies writing, infomercial tone, press-release approach, absence of narrative continuity, or the absence of film-making in general. But sometimes, there’s no escape. There’s no other way to put it. If not for the credit “A Shyam Benegal Film,” it’d be hard to tell that Mujib: The Making of a Nation were made by anyone at all. Such is the craft of the 178-minute biopic on Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the charismatic Bengali leader widely known as the Founding Father of Bangladesh.
Co-produced by the NFDC (National Film Development Corporation of India) and BFDC (Bangladesh Film Development Corporation), the wide-ranging life story is reduced to a series of state-sponsored bullet points and vintage Pakistan bashing. It adds nothing to – even subtracts from – what we can find with a Google search. Every phase – his student-activist days in the British Raj, a young Mujib’s rising stature in the All India Muslim League, his disillusionment with West Pakistan, his fight for secularism and autonomy, the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, his troubled Presidency years – is narrated by his wife. But the staging itself looks like an afterthought. The voice-over doubles up as lazy transitions. It unfolds like a book whose denser pages are conveniently missing. One moment he’s dying on a hunger strike, the next he’s protesting outside a parliament, with nothing but a quick “he recovered” connecting the two timelines. One moment his first child is born and the next, he has four, with nothing but a quick “his family grew” in between. One moment he becomes the president and declares independence, and the next, he refuses to eat rice during the 1974 famine. One moment we see the archival footage of an Indira Gandhi interview, and the next, Bangladesh is free. One moment we’re entering the cinema hall in the morning, and the next, it’s late evening. One moment we’re reminiscing about Mandi (1983), and the next, we’re cringing at Mujib: The Making of a Nation.