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Maharaj, starring Junaid Khan, Shalini Pandey and Jaideep Ahlawat, recently released on Netflix after facing a few delays. The film has been receiving mixed reviews for having a protagonist who seems to be fighting for women’s rights in the 1860s but also shames his fiance Kishori, played by Shalini Pandey, for her orthodox beliefs, which leads to her dying by suicide. Now, in a new interview, director Siddharth P Malhotra was questioned about Kishori’s rapid transformation that happens in just one scene, making it look abrupt and rapid.
Kishori’s character went from being a blind supporter of Maharaj, the self-proclaimed godman played by Jaideep Ahlawat, to realising that he was raping naive women, in just a flash of a scene. When asked about his decision to capture her disillusionment in a few seconds, Malhotra defended his decision by saying, “It’s a film.” He told Zoom, “If I don’t move its story, people will say the film is slow. If I don’t show these beats in the film, and there were additional beats which supported it, if I don’t keep those, how do I get to the libel case?”
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He further said that “in a human story, she would have had to process it, take some time, understand where things go. Graph wise, for Shalini, if I had more time, then I would play with more scenes to feel that empathy and understanding of what has gone to her entire belief system. But in a two-hour film, you got to move from one point to another point to… there is so much to say that there is no other options but to just you know move the story ahead.”
Kishori’s character snaps after she sees the self-styled godman trying to rape her sister. But soon after that, she dies by suicide.
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