Viceroy's House

For the first film of our new season we chose this film: it fulfilled the basic selection criteria in that several of the committee had seen and enjoyed it. The added bonus was the presence in the cast of Hugh Bonneville: and we ended up with the best attended film since Mamma Mia - quite a few years ago.

The audience was thirsty so the bar had healthy takings and the film went down very well.

Here are my notes:

Viceroy’s House

USA 2016        103 minutes

Director:          Gurinder Chadha

Starring:            Hugh Bonneville, Gillian Anderson, Manish Dayal, Huma Qureshi and Michael Gambon

 “…I found myself increasingly gripped by Chadha’s handsome period drama – impressed by the accessibility of its history-primer narrative, entertained by its warm wit and occasionally boisterous charm, and moved by its melodramatic contrivances, which turn out to be more rooted in fact that one might imagine.”

Mark Kermode

In 1947 Lord Louis Mountbatten (Hugh Bonneville) has been given the task of bringing about the transition of India from its role as the jewel in Britain’s imperial crown to an independent state. As he and his wife Edwina (Gillian Anderson) oversee the complex process, clashes between the conflicting political and religious forces are resolved only by the partition of the country into two separate states; as a result of this there is a massive displacement of refugees who have to risk everything to seek sanctuary within their newly defined homelands.

Chadha’s objective for her screenplay was to tell the story of the shared history of India and Pakistan in the style of the British historical epic: thus she placed the Viceroy’s House at the centre of the story. Her plan was for an Upstairs, Downstairs approach that looked at life both in the state rooms and the servant’s quarters; for her it was important that the Indian characters were not marginalised, and thus she ensured that they would have equal screen time with the white members of the cast. Initially she was annoyed that Downton Abbey reached the screens while she was still planning her film, although its subsequent global success popularised her chosen genre and also gave her Hugh Bonneville to play the key role of the Viceroy. Chadha’s own family was affected by the partition of India and she reveals the details of their history in an epilogue to the film.

In addition to its dramatization of the complex politics of partition and its impact on the population the film also uses recent research that revealed Churchill’s responsibility for the chaos that resulted from his promotion of the establishment of a separate Pakistan as a strategic counter-balance to a left-leaning India. From a British perspective this division allowed Britain to retain influence in Karachi, an important port on the coast of the Arabian Sea and the capital of a country strategically located on the borders of Afghanistan, thus making it a vital counter to any threat of Soviet expansion southwards.

Gurinder Chadha was born in Kenya before moving to the UK with her family while still a young child. Her early work explored the lives of Indians living in Britain and drew on her own experience: her first film was the BAFTA nominated Bhaji on the Beach (1993) and she made her name internationally with her second feature, Bend It Like Beckham (2002), which also made a star of Keira Knightley. She followed this with Bride and Prejudice (2004), a Bollywood version of Jane Austen’s novel, which opened at Number One in both the UK and India. Viceroy’s House received its first screening at the Berlin Film Festival and has recently been dubbed into Hindi for release in India.

 Here is the trailer: