PROVOKED: Kiranjit Ahluwalia's true story reduced to a crude cartoon. |
Last week I complained that Stephanie Daley was a little obtuse about the issues involved in its subject, teen infanticide. This film demonstrates how the opposite can be worse. In 1989, a Punjab immigrant, Kiranjit Ahluwalia (a stunning Aishwarya Rai), set fire to her husband (Naveen Andrews) after years of abuse. The man died, Ahluwalia went to jail for murder, and the case became a cause célèbre that eventually led to an appeal, her early release, and the passing of an enlightened law regarding the prosecution of abuse victims. Very inspiring, but when reduced to a crude cartoon all it provokes is annoyance. Telling the story through clumsy flashbacks that culminate in a montage of “greatest hits” leading up to the torching, director Jag Mundhra reduces the tragedy to caricatures of good and evil. Rai offers a single expression of wide-eyed, non-comprehending terror, and nothing in her performance or the film shines any light into the heroine’s resistance or her redemption.
