Homebound: The film pushes many buttons, and that keeps it from greatness

We don't remember Henry Fonda from the cinematic The Grapes of Wrath, nor Om Puri from Bhisham Sahni's Tamas (both excellent performances) but are awed by the films themselves

The film Homebound is India’s candidate for this year’s best international feature Oscar.  Its pedigree includes our Karan Johar and Hollywood’s Martin Scorsese.  It has warmed the hearts of movie aficionados.  And rightly so, because as leading critic Shubhra Gupta puts it, “if you have to see one film which talks of all these elephants [of centuries of systemic discrimination, and disenfranchisement] that have gone missing from so many rooms over so many unconscionable years, make it this one”.

 

In the summer of 2020, at the height of the Covid lockdown, this paper ran a series of articles called Pandemic