Bawaal has been called out for its insensitive depiction of the Holocaust by a Jewish human rights group.
Nitesh Tiwari’s latest film Bawaal has created quite a lot of chaos but in the unintended way. The film has been in the eye of a controversy ever since its first teaser was released and a few references to the Holocaust were spotted. Upon release, the film was slammed as insensitive towards the victims of the tragedy. Now, a Jewish human rights group has also taken umbrage to the Holocaust and Hitler references in the film, slamming the producers.
Bawaal, starring Varun Dhawan and Janhvi Kapoor, released on Amazon Prime Video on July 21. The film uses a young couple’s learning of the sufferings of Jews in the Holocaust as a lesson to repair their relationship. But critics have said that the film approaches this is ‘tone deaf’. On Monday, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group shared such a critique of the film on Twitter, and attacked the makers.
The tweet read, “If the film’s shameless producers wanted to use such an outrage to gain PR for their movie they succeeded.” The group then asked the makers of Bawaal to remove the offending scenes or demanded that Amazon Prime Video delete it from their service. “They must immediately remove this ultimate trivialization of the suffering and systematic murder of millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust or @Amazon @PrimeVideo should delete #Bawaal from its service. Disgraceful,” read the tweet.
The few scenes that have earned the wrath of the critics in Bawaal include a sequence where Varun and Janhvi’s characters picture themselves as inmates of the Auschwitz concentraton camp and visualise themselves being suffocated in the gas chambers. There are lines of dialogue like ‘We are all a little like Hitler’, and ‘Every relationship has its Auschwitz’, that have also been criticised.
Bawaal has been written by Ashwini Iyer Tiwary, and produced by Tiwary and Sajid Nadiadwala. It is currently streaming on Prime Video.
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 "Janhvi Kapoor in a still from Bawaal")
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