Sardar Udham: Shoojit Sircar’s landmark biopic is the greatest depiction of Partition trauma

Directed by Shoojit Sircar, who has a habit of extracting career-best performances from movie stars, Sardhar Udham is an unconventional ‘biopic’ of the legendary freedom fighter who assassinated one of the men responsible for the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of 1919. His film isn’t at all like RRR; there is no room for embellishment or fantasy here. The tone is near-uniformly grim, and the structure fragmented. The dialogue is economical; people only say what needs to be said. Which means that unlike most other movies of its kind, the central performance in Sardar Udham is defined almost entirely by long stretches of silence, at least for the opening hour.

In his video, Smith said that the binary ‘fight-or-flight’ response to perceived threats has been amended. A person might also ‘freeze’, or ‘fawn’. Udham Singh’s response to witnessing the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre certainly didn’t didn’t freeze him, nor did he ever fawn over his oppressors. He chose to fight. The movie follows his journey to the U.K., his infiltration of his target Michael O’Dwyer’s inner circle, followed by the actual assassination. This happens mostly in the first half; the movie reserves the third act for one of the most unrelentingly brutal sequences of violence ever committed to celluloid. A less transgressive filmmaker would have restricted the massacre scene to only a few minutes; heck, they would’ve opened the film with it and ended it with the assassination. But Sardar Udham isn’t a regular biopic, it’s a character study.

But by choosing to devote nearly 45 minutes to recreating the Massacre, Sircar forces generations that have become indifferent to the horrors of our recent past to watch in stunned silence. He traps you in that ‘maidaan’, cutting away only to point fingers at the people responsible. All of it unfolds through a young Udham Singh’s perspective, and it is in this sequence that Kaushal enters a bit of a trance-like state; it’s like you’re watching somebody have an out-of-body experience on screen. But as affecting as he is in that final stretch, and also in the fabulous courtroom scenes that come before it, Kaushal’s most understated work comes in that first half, when he’s planning his mission, driven not so much by revenge as a desire for justice.

One of the highlights of that first hour is Udham Singh’s (presumably made-up) interaction with his victim, O’Dwyer. After having charmed his way into O’Dwyer’s house, literally, Udham Singh finds himself having a conversation about the massacre one evening. “They deserved it,” a drunk O’Dwyer says mostly to himself. “You can’t rise in rebellion and expect a medal. They got what was coming.” Udham Singh stops in his tracks, and then begins to silently prowl around his prey. “Something bothering you, sir?” he snarls, as he gets a revolver out. But both in action and demeanour, Udham Singh shows restraint. He wants to make a statement, and murdering O’Dwyer in his living room isn’t going to get the message across.

The conversation takes a philosophical turn, with O’Dwyer asking Udham if he’d be willing to kill to save others. “It depends,” he says, as O’Dwyer begins to rationalise the actions of that day. And this is when Kaushal, the actor, snaps into another level. Having heard O’Dwyer’s ramblings about striking fear in the hearts of the rebels, Udham Singh says unblinkingly, “There were women, children… wounded.” He takes the slightest of pauses between each word, barely able to comprehend the evil in front of him. His trauma, buried for years in the depths of his soul, bubbles to the surface.

Having already proven himself with his debut starring role in the modern classic Masaan, Kaushal cemented his stature as perhaps one of India’s most talented leading men with Sardar Udham, a movie that despite universal acclaim, isn’t quite spoken about as often, or as enthusiastically, as one might have anticipated. Kaushal’s own reputation has also evolved over the years. And certainly, he hasn’t done himself any favours by starring in films such as Govinda Naam Mera and Sanju, although, unlike those films, one can at least imagine why he’d do something like Uri: The Surgical Strike. But despite these occasional missteps, there is little doubt that he’s operating in rarified space, perhaps matched only by Rajkummar Rao and Ranveer Singh.

Great actors have portrayed trauma on screen over the years, in films as diverse as the harrowing Manchester by the Sea and the uncomfortably subversive Elle. In fact, Sardar Udham isn’t the only movie about a grieving assassin on a silent revenge mission, sandwiched as it was between John Wick 3 and 4. It isn’t an easy film to pull off; one false step and you could find yourself in melodramatic territory. But Kaushal’s performance is perfectly in-sync with the very particular tone that Sircar aims for, and then sustains for over two-and-a-half-hours. He has the unique ability to always know what kind of movie he’s in. You can’t teach this. In an alternate reality, the actor could’ve been the natural successor to Amitabh Bachchan’s Angry Young Man persona, but such is his range that he’s equally believable as a romantic hero and psychopath. Vicky Kaushal is one of our finest.