Over the closing credits of this film, we learnt that director Gurinder Chadha's grandparents took part in their own epic, tragic story during the partition of India. But her film is a strangely middlebrow one, sympathetic to ordinary Indians (and ending with an inter-faith love story) but also generous to the British royal family, while the politicians and bureaucrats get it in the neck. I don't know enough detail to verify the history, but I'd be very surprised if any expert considered this filn kinder to Jinnah (the founder of Pakistan and also the bogeyman of Richard Attenborough's 'Gandhi') than it is to Lord Mountbatten. Centred, as it says in its title, on the Viceroy's house, it never quite manages to capture the scale of what was happening across the country. I've seen plenty of worse films, but it's an oddly mild account of the British withdrawal.
Review of Viceroy's House
