Review: Batwara 1947

Batwara 1947 has the right instincts. Rajkumar Santoshi is telling a Partition story through one family's forced migration from Meerut to Lahore, and he's careful with the material, particularly in how evenhandedly the film treats the religious violence on both sides of the new border. Sunny Deol and Shabana Azmi anchor it with real conviction; Karan Deol, in a more substantial role than he's had before, holds his own alongside them.

What the film doesn't have is urgency. Billed in its own marketing as a Sunny Deol action drama, it delivers remarkably little of that, and the dialogue and pacing lean on a style of filmmaking Santoshi himself moved past decades ago with Ghayal and Damini. The second half in particular drags through stretches that a tighter edit would have fixed, and a climax largely without the payoff the trailers implied.

What the film doesn't have is urgency.

There's a genuinely moving film inside Batwara 1947, visible in scattered scenes, particularly anything between Deol and Azmi. It just never fully escapes the more old-fashioned, over-long picture surrounding it.