Gandhi Godse: Ek Yudh Review - A Fiction With No Traction Of History

Rajkumar Santoshi returns to the silver screen after a nine-year wait with Gandhi Godse: Ek Yudh. In the title, they have called it a war, but it's not a violent war. It's a war of ideologies with no weapons available to use. I happened to see a Marathi play called Me Nathuram Godse Boltoy, and I was stunned by it. As we know, Godse shot Gandhi and went to jail; hence, he never got the chance to explain his doings and thoughts. The play gave him the stage, and it's all about his ideology with a twist of Gandhi's perception to it. I was expecting a solid, hard-hitting product from Santoshi, but this was too mild and fictional to suit the context people were hoping for. Well, that's one perspective, but Gandhi Godse has a safe outing from another perspective. We live in a social media era where even rat-sized things create Everest-level controversies. Maybe that's why Santoshi chose it. However, cinematic realistic values are too low to keep you immersed as a viewer.Gandhi Godse starts off with a partition between India and Pakistan in 1947. How it destroyed many lives and our unity are the expected follow-ups. Soon, we meet Nathuram Godse (Chinmay Mandlekar), who is disturbed by Hindu-Muslim riots and assumes Mahatma Gandhi (Deepak Antani) is responsible for the partition and riots. He decides to pluck out the root of it by killing Gandhi and successfully dragging three bullets into him. Up until here, it's a historical drama, but then it becomes a fictional drama that nobody would be interested in. Gandhi survives, and Godse is sent to jail. Soon, Gandhi is also sent to the same jail, and he chooses the same ward where Godse is put in. These two have several conversations and that's 'The Yudh of Ideologies' this film is meant to present.Gandhi Godse is 110 minutes long and still a terribly slow film. The first half is too boring to hold your attention, and that's what causes you to lose interest in the film. You have to keep the audience awake to let them see your story; you can't expect them to take a nap in the first half and then wake up after the intermission. The screenplay of Gandhi Godse fails—and how. Then the second half has some healthy conversations that define the entire film, but it's too late by then. One of the major flaws appears at the beginning only when you see the scene of Gandhi's survival. From there, it becomes difficult for you to accept the film and go along with it. There is no 'Yudh' between Gandhi and Godse; it's more like Gandhi with Godse and Gandhi vs. Congress. Something just doesn't feel right here, politically or theoretically.Gandhi Godse is a performance-oriented film, and it scores high grades there. Deepak Antani has played the part of Mahatma Gandhi more than 500 times, and you just have to add one more to the list. He looks like Gandhi, he walks like Gandhi, and he talks like Gandhi, so you feel like you're watching the real Mahatma Gandhi on the big screen. Chinmay Mandlekar is getting better with every next film, and Nathuram Godse's portrayal in this film proves that. The cute debutant Tanisha Santoshi is decent, but her character is a big misfit in this narrative. The supporting cast had done a fantastic job, and you felt like watching them get more screen time, but that didn't happen unfortunately.Technical aspects of Gandhi Godse are promising, but not all. The cinematography and art design are both beautiful. It lacks breathtaking frames, though. What you can easily notice are glitches in the editing, right from the first scene of riots. The film suffers badly due to the absence of hard-hitting dialogues. I mean, the verbal war between Gandhi and Godse is supposed to be hard hitting and clap-worthy, but here you hardly get any such lines. "Sarkare hukumat karti hai, desh seva nahi," that one line by Gandhi hits hard, and there are a couple of other one liners in the jail scene that leave you in awe. Rajkumar Santoshi has done comedy, action, and romantic films, and he gets into a new zone with Gandhi Godse, only to see lower results. He is done with those evergreen films like Ghayal, Damini, Andaz Apna Apna, Ghatak, Pukar, and The Legend of Bhagat Singh and is likely not to repeat them, but he is not even going close to them nowadays. The 9-year gap says a lot. He could have done better—a lot better, actually. Overall, Gandhi Godse offers a highly fictionalised battle that can be seen once to know the ideologies of deshbhakts with opposite mindsets.