Hansal Mehta and writer Apurva Asrani have taken the story for their new film from real events, but their dramatisation of Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras’s tragedy isn’t shrill or militant.
Aligarh is a hard hitting film that clearly advocates gay rights but the beauty is, it does so by constructing a deeply moving portrait of love and loneliness.
As Anupama Chopra said in her review:
“The film invites you into Siras’s world, it makes you understand the very marrow of his melancholy and then devastatingly it indites you for his terrible predicament. He dies under mysterious circumstances, absolutely alone and we understand that we have all contributed in ways big and small to the creation of a society which hounds a mild smiling man to death simply because of his sexual preferences. It’s a bleak tale told with tenderness.”
Chopra also said that Aligarh would have been impossible without the prodigious talent of Manoj Bajpayee who plays Siras. His shoulder’s are stooped, his smile is hesitant and his eyes seem permanently bewildered by the brutality of the world.
Although it’s second month of the year, she called it the best performance of 2016 and rated it with four stars.