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Prahaar
1991 166’ col/scope Hindi d/co-s Nana Patekar pc Divya Films Combine co-s Sujit Sen dial Hriday Lani lyr Mangesh Kulkarni c Debu Deodhar m Laxmikant- Pyarelal lp Nana Patekar, Dimple Kapadia, Madhuri Dixit, Habib Tanvir
Patekar’s weirdly fascist fantasy of a military Pied Piper followed by naked boys about to be transformed into a glorious army of bullies which will sort out the mess created by ‘emasculated’ people in the real world. The first half of the film lovingly portrays a dictatorial Major Chouhan (Patekar himself) subjecting the youthful male bodies to some gruelling tests. We learn that the major’s Messianism is rooted in a tragic childhood: his mother was sold as a prostitute and he spends the rest of his life compensating for the helplessness he felt then. When one of the major’s wards is killed by gangsters extracting protection money from his father, the local baker, Patekar confronts the thugs, but the ordinary folk in the area do not understand the need for drastic action and the hero is forced to massacre the villains in the dead of night, watched only by the widow of one of their former victims. The climax is, in the light of subsequent events in Bombay, a chillingly deliberate orgy of violence. The ensuing court case sentences Patekar to a lunatic asylum, where he fantasises about his naked, pubescent army.