Main Atal Hoon: A Good Indian Biopic Seems Like A Tall Order

The timing of the release of Main Atal Hoon (2024) starring Pankaj Tripathi is not surprising at all.

There’s a nearly five-minute long sequence at the beginning of Thackeray (2019) in which Bal Thackeray is watching an animated film in a theater in Bombay, sometime in the mid-1950s. During a particular scene featuring a dog tied to a pole and a cunning fox, he starts picturing a hapless Marathi man who’s being mercilessly ridiculed, pushed around, and mistreated by people belonging to other communities, states, and religions. The scene is picturized as an integral moment of transformation for the young Balasaheb, which awakens him to take up the cause of the common Marathi people. This would be a hilarious story if it weren’t true. Unfortunately, it exists on an OTT platform near you.

The thing about making pro-power propaganda cinema is that either it’ll have to be bloody well-made (a rarest of rare species) or be peppered with controversial and shocking (read: The Kashmir Files, The Kerala Story) imageries in order to reach the audience which such films are targeting.

This latter kind has a more menacing edge, since these films are more reliant on generating a certain kind of vicious hatred for the “other” – in these two cases, Indian Muslims – instead of garnering empathy for the victims and survivors of the atrocities depicted in them.

The timing of the release of Main Atal Hoon (2024) starring Pankaj Tripathi won’t surprise even a three-year-old who has never seen a film or an election. Three days after the film hit theaters, the most newsworthy temple ever built in the history of the human race was inaugurated in Ayodhya – which many believe, is the BJP’s predominant pitch for the approaching Lok Sabha polls this year.

However, the tone of this film is so bafflingly pedestrian and repetitious that chances are it’ll fail to leave any impact on those too who might be ardent supporters of the party and its ideals. It’s bewildering because Main Atal Hoon is helmed by a National Award-winning filmmaker, Ravi Jadhav. But he seems to be weighed down by the banal attempt to show every momentous occasion of Vajpayee’s long political career, which began right from his student days. It could have been a slightly more interesting and even arousing character study of a poet-politician if only it had focused on one or a few significant decisions he had to make while he was the prime minister of the country – for instance, the commencement of the Kargil War with which the film begins.

Alas, it ends up being another Wikipedia entry-esque biopic of simply highs and lows of a personality devoid of any nuance. This is a cardinal sin committed historically by nearly every biopic made in India, barring only a handful.

The actor portraying Indira Gandhi is often shot in extreme close-ups with a somewhat ominous background score to accompany, almost like a Marvel supervillain. A part of my brain which had nearly shut down by that time almost expected her to say out loud “Indira Khush Hua” after she declares the Emergency in 1975. Those filmgoers who might idolize someone of Vajpayee’s stature are also exposed to world cinema today, and Main Atal Hoon could have benefitted from avoiding such broad strokes portrayal of important figures, an outdated style of filmmaking now. Even the recently released Sam Bahadur (2023), a far more layered film in comparison and a box office success, succumbs to playing to the gallery by portraying Jawahar Lal Nehru as a weak, and perennially confused leader in the few scenes in which he appears.

Film historian Ephraim Katz had called the one-reel, 90-second short film Tearing Down the Spanish Flag (1898) – which consists of a single shot of, well, a hand tearing down a Spanish flag – “the world’s first propaganda film”. Perhaps the most successful propaganda filmmaker of all time was Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003), a Nazi sympathizer best known for her documentary films made in the 1930s which were scrupulously designed to communicate the German Nazi Party’s ideology to the masses.

While hagiographies aren’t a new phenomenon in India, the blatantness of the purpose they’re supposed to serve is what’s making them both irrelevant and inconsequential currently. Take 2019’s much-publicized PM Narendra Modi starring Vivek Oberoi for instance, which became more popular on X (erstwhile Twitter) among memers than among film lovers. Initially, the film was supposed to release on 5th April 2019, about a week before the general elections were held that year. But it was later postponed to 24th May after the Election Commission’s recommendation, following complaints from the Indian National Congress and other opposition parties about the violation of the Model Code of Conduct. Even the BJP’s IT cell washed its hands of the film, maybe after they couldn’t stay awake through its entire runtime themselves.

Main Atal Hoon will possibly not suffer as terrible a fate as Oberoi’s film, but Tripathi’s portrayal of Atal Bihari Vajpayee has to be its biggest let down. While he’s proven himself to be a gifted actor time and again, here he focuses so much on Vajpayee’s mannerisms instead of the complexities of his life – both personal and political – that it becomes caricaturish long before the credits start rolling. A few years ago, Anupam Kher’s interpretation of former PM Dr Manmohan Singh in The Accidental Prime Minister (2019), an excruciatingly awful affair, had fallen into the same trap. The last time a mid-40s actor playing a college student that made for an uncomfortable viewing experience was Aamir Khan in Rajkumar Hirani’s 3 Idiots. Tripathi, behind terrible makeup and hairdos, plays a man in his early 20s for at least the first half hour of Main Atal Hoon. I’ll need to watch the next season of Mirzapur soon enough to forget that image now imprinted on my mind.