Article 370

Following the recent Main Atal Hoon, Aditya Suhas Jambhale’s Article 370 is the latest in an election season wave of Bollywood films that celebrate the accomplishments of the BJP, under the thin guise of a uniting sense of Indian nationalism. Unsurprisingly, Indian critics have largely seen the film through the lens of their own politics; depending on whose assessment you read, it’s either a riveting political thriller or a propaganda piece liberally mixing facts and fiction. Audiences, in line with the BJP’s strong levels of current popularity and the self-selective nature of ticket-buying, have largely embraced the movie, catapulting it to box office success that caught some industry prognosticators by surprise.

As an outside observer stationed in the West, I found the movie’s politics to be entirely unengaging: too obvious and partisan to be thought-provoking, but not over-the-top enough to fuel the kind of rah-rah, saber-rattling entertainment that made Fighter so enjoyable for me. Just as I was getting into the rhythm of the story, there would come another explicit political appeal that took me out of the proceedings and reminded me that “this movie isn’t for you.” Which is not to say that I know enough to have strong feelings about the positions the film stakes out, but rather, that it adopts them with such inelegance that this interferes with the fluidity of its storytelling. A movie like Fighter goes so hard on the propaganda that it becomes part of its aesthetic; Article 370 is still trying to sell itself as a straight-ahead spy thriller, which makes its digressions into virtue-signaling feel like disruptions.

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