A man’s struggle for identity can be an absorbing story. Uplifting even, if it is connected with a country’s freedom struggle. Gour Hari’s ‘dastaan’, based on the quest of a real-life character, has all the elements that could have made it all this and more, but it comes off flat and dull.

Gour Hari Dastaan: The Freedom File is a very solemn, very onerous, very sanctimonious harangue about many, many things. All things, in fact. But at its core it’s a film about director Anant Mahadevan and writer C.P. Surendran (a senior journalist) desperately wanting to burnish and shove their credentials as people with a conscience, as people who care and worry about important things in our faces.

At no point does the film fully convey the deep sense of frustration and helplessness that Gour Hari Das would have felt in the course of his 32-year struggle to prove that he was indeed a freedom fighter. Owing to its undeniably relevant theme, Gour Hari Dastaan does have some archival value. If only it had more to offer, it would have come far closer to being the triumph that it – and its subject – deserved to be.

A biopic needs to be engaging, but in ‘Gour Hari Dastaan’, more attention seems to have been paid to the dialogues than the storytelling. It hardly evokes emotions in you and make you feel for the trials and tribulations of the man struggling for his due. Go for it if you want to soak in the Independence Day spirit.

After being kicked out by his wife, the said journo finds love in a colleague (Tannistha Chatterjee) who doesn’t do much except following Shorey around and discussing his angst and his work.

The dour performances don’t help either. Neither does the thick, gloomy air of the film. While the story is electrifying and inspiring, the film doesn’t manage to do justice. Too bad, really.

Director Ananth Mahadevan plays it safe by ticking all the boxes: adapting a story that got enough press to have recall, getting former journalist C P Surendran to pen the screenplay, and casting faces who have a proven success rate in such films. But what he didn’t account for is investing time to establish a mood and to allow his characters to find themselves instead of rushing into scripted characteristics. It’s like the perfect school play, everyone knows their lines, everyone falls in line and little is left to mind.

A biopic needs to be engaging, but in ‘Gour Hari Dastaan’, more attention seems to have been paid to the dialogues than the storytelling. It hardly evokes emotions in you and make you feel for the trials and tribulations of the man struggling for his due. Go for it if you want to soak in the Independence Day spirit.

The screenplay is pretty boring with just a few dashes of humour. Unfortunately, those are not enough to get the audiences glued. The editing could have been crispier and the cinematography more thoughtful. It’s the treatment that the film and its subject absolutely deserved that’s missing. We would go with a 2 star for this one for a few dialogues like ‘Ladai toh kab ki chhod di, but haar nahi maan raha hu’ and an attempt to put forward a biopic that people needed to know about.