Reviews & Ratings for
ஹே ராம் (2000)

I'm still a little shell-shocked from watching Hey Ram over the last two nights.

I did not know really anything about the film going in, and I come away with awe and respect for the grandiose vision of director, writer and lead actor Kamal Haasan. This is the first time I have seen him, and on top of the incredible achievement of making this film, he is an amazing actor as well.

The time period of this movie is Partition, from the riots of the summer of 1947 up to Ghandi's assassination in 1948. Haasan using the framing device of he as an elderly man dying of old age, and his grandson telling his story to the doctor treating him. As they are trying to transport him to a hospital, they are caught up in a riot, and have to hide underground. The sounds of gunfire transport the old man back to the events of the movie.

Ran is an archaeologist working with his Muslim friend played by SRK. After a fun drinking number in a club, he travels back to Calcutta to see his Bengali wife, played beautifully by Rani Mukerji. He is dismissive of her fears of violence in the streets, but has to save a young woman from a mob. When he returns home to their apartment, he is forced to listen as his wife is raped and murdered in the next room. This sends Ram into a frenzy of revenge.

The intellectual, scientist is gone, and he spends much of the movie in a frenzied fog of revenge and PTSD. Any sound of crying brings him right back to the horrible cries of his wife.

He gets caught up in a plot to kill Ghandi, and even though his family finds him a second wife, he is relentless in his goal. There are fantasy sequences where he dreams of himself as a muscular mythic hero, and of his wife turning into a gun. I'm sure I didn't catch all of the symbols and references.

He encounters his Muslim friend, SRK, again late in the movie, and they save each other in a desperate battle in the Muslim quarter of New Dehli. Shahrukh's acting style seems overblown next to the subtlety of Haasan, but partly his character is supposed to be the more jovial and melodramatic one.

The final scenes show how Ram turns away from his plan and becomes a devotee of Ghandi and witnesses his killing.

Hasaan has created an epic, about the effects of Partition, and about the damaged psyches of those caught up in the violence and its aftermath. A legacy that lingers.