Viceroy's House

Delhi, 1947. Lord Mountbatten arrives as India's last viceroy, expected to manage the handover to independence. While political bargaining runs upstairs, hundreds of Indian staff work below, and the relationship between two of them, Jeet and Aalia, becomes impossible as the country is divided. The subject is not the handover ceremony but the distance between two floors of one building. A line drawn on a map upstairs means, downstairs, who goes where. The form is broad and scaled like a period picture, built on costume, the residence and crowds. At the end, real footage from the railway stations enters and the film changes register. Gurinder Chadha's own family was displaced by partition, and she describes the film as personal for that reason. Its political claim, that the partition plan had been prepared in advance in London, was disputed by historians, and the writer Fatima Bhutto published a sharp criticism. It was released in India as Partition: 1947. Hugh Bonneville plays Mountbatten and Gillian Anderson his wife Edwina; it is among Michael Gambon's late works. Who it is for: viewers who want period drama and an entry point into the history of partition. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the story told from the Indian side; the film mostly looks down from the upper floor.