‘August 16, 1947’ movie review: Insipid screenplay kills an intriguing freedom struggle story

‘August 16, 1947,’ directed by NS Ponkumar and headlined by Gautham Karthik, is a historical social drama produced by AR Murugadoss

In August 16, 1947, debutant director NS Ponkumar wants you to think a lot from your heart. He is confident in how his screenplay’s emotional beats move and engages you and that confidence stems from the impressive baseline he has: In 1947, when communication wasn’t advanced and you couldn’t make movies on TikTok, the news of India’s independence from the colonial government might have had some delays in reaching every nook and corner of such a vast nation, and that’s what happened on August 14 to Sengadu, a village in Southern Tamil Nadu sandwiched by mighty mountains and snarly woods. The village is known for its high-quality cotton yield that is hand-made by the villagers who are treated as slaves by British General Robert Clive (Richard Ashton). This towering animal is apparently one of the officers who advised General Dyre to massacre thousands at Jallianwala Bagh, after which he was sent to Sengadu on punishment duty. Basically, he is an animal that feasts on fear and flesh, and Sengadu is his land of slaves.

You pause to drink water, and you are whipped. Want to take a leak? Remember that the whip has spikes. If you get hurt while working, you are gifted with more pain as medicine; for worse or better, you sometimes catch a quick bullet from Robert. To make matters worse, the villagers have to disguise their daughters or kill them to prevent Robert’s pervert son Justin (Jason Shah) from laying his hands on them — as sinister as his father, he even uses the statue of the villager’s deity for bodily pleasure. On the day before independence, all attempts by the British to inform Robert of the news and summon him for a high-level meeting fail as the only telephone in his estate is under repair. The men who were assigned to physically deliver the message get killed by a tiger. But even if the news reaches Robert, it is futile, as we learn eventually, as the man wants his ‘slaves’ to remember the fear of the British until they live.

If you get flashes of a Django Unchained or a Lagaan, it’s because this is an intriguing storyline full of potential, and it gets massacred slowly over two hours. Chiefly, NS Ponkumar is hell-bent on spoon-feeding — no, drowning — us with melodrama and repeated displays of baseless brutality to milk every drop of emotion out of us. From the beginning, when Robert’s monstrosity is repeatedly established, Ponkumar prolongs and stretches everything he wants to tell and do.

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Melodrama can still work if staged and executed well, and I say this because the core of August 16, 1947 does have a strong emotional pulse. It’s a love story between a young orphan Paraman (Gautham Karthik) and Thenmozhi (Revathy Sharma), the daughter of Sengadu’s Zamindar who, in fear of Justin, has locked her up inside his bungalow for years after telling the villagers that she died of a disease as a child. And the roots of Paraman, what he means to the village and how that ties up to Thenmozhi are all lovely ideas. But at regular intervals, like a bizarre flashback scene in a hut that makes you roll your eyes, something or the other keeps asking you not to take this film seriously.

Adding Justin into the mix, the love story should have seemed more gripping, but what follows is more predictable that anything one can imagine. At every point, you are met with a cliche turn of events or an infuriating action by a character. I mean, Thenmozhi, hiding from the men of her father, shakes a leg in the middle of the street during an unnecessary song. The way some behave in the presence of the antagonists can make you eat the rubber of your seats.

The film never redeems itself from these issues and that’s the biggest problem with August 16, 1947: the freedom fight that is meant to be the very purpose of this story is nothing but the result of one man’s glorious clarion call of a speech, and the course of action that they do isn’t clever enough either. Making matters worse is how even Robert ends up being a caricaturish dull-witted villain. The story might be set in 1947 but the audiences are in 2023!