Movie review: 'The Warrior Queen of Jhansi' can't rise above clumsy script
“The Warrior Queen of Jhansi” - ★ ½
One of the leaders of the rebellion against the British East India Company, Rani Lakshmibai bedeviled her land's colonizers in 1858. The story of an insurgent Indian woman certainly seems timely in 2019. Too bad the new account of her uprising, “The Warrior Queen of Jhansi,” is as stodgy as a movie from 1958, if not earlier.
The film is the directorial debut of Swati Bhise, a Mumbai-born, New York-based dancer and choreographer. Her principal collaborator is her daughter, Devika Bhise, who helped mom and Olivia Emden write the script and who plays the rani (or queen). The younger woman even directed the last few days of shooting after her mother was hospitalized with pneumonia.
The Bhises surrounded themselves with pros, including actors Rupert Everett, Derek Jacobi and Jodhi May, as well as an experienced production team. The result is a film with striking locations and sumptuous visuals, undercut by choppy pacing, clumsy dialogue and ungainly exposition that includes unnecessary and bewildering flashbacks.
The younger Bhise trained extensively for the action scenes in which she leads female fighters against British troops. The movie's battle sequences are credible, if not especially visceral. But most of the movie is devoted to talk, which sometimes lurches inexplicably among English and two Indian languages: Hindi and Marathi.
Lakshmibai chats aplenty with her advisers and entourage, and she negotiates with a British officer, Ellis (Ben Lamb), who respects her. But he can't prevent the East India Company from reneging on past agreements and seeking to seize her territory after her husband dies.
Ellis reports to a senior officer (Everett, outfitted with immense mutton chops) and the company's representative, Sir Robert Hamilton (Nathaniel Parker), whose racism, greed and misogyny could hardly be drawn more simply. Meanwhile in Britain, the prime minister (Jacobi) briefs Queen Victoria (May), who counsels restraint, to no avail.
History records that, in the wake of the 1857-1858 rebellion, the British East India Company lost control of the subcontinent, which instead came to be governed directly by the British government. In its end notes, the movie connects the handover to India's achieving independence from Britain in 1947. Considering all the blood spilled before and since, this epilogue doesn't feel quite so triumphant as “The Warrior Queen of Jhansi” wants it to be.
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Starring: Devika Bhise, Ben Lamb, Rupert Everett, Derek Jacobi, Jodhi May
Directed by: Swati Bhise
Other: A Roadside Attractions release. Rated R for violence. In English, Hindi and Marathi with some subtitles. 103 minutes