Bhutto (2010)

Benazir Bhutto-The Iron Lady of Pakistan was a daunting personality all by herself. She was the first Muslim lady to become the prime minister of a Muslim nation not just once but twice. She was assassinated while she was running the campaign for the third term in Dec 2007 when she returned home after being held in exile for seven years. Bhutto-A documentary on Bhutto dynasty starts with the India-Pakistan partition in 1947 and leads to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's ascendancy to the presidency in 1971. The focus of the documentary swiftly shifts to his elder daughter, Benazir Bhutto, a magnetic yet beautiful person who was studying in Oxford carrying no passion to pursue politics ever in her life. But fate had decided the other way. Her father's reign was overthrown by a military coup Zia Ul Haq in 1977 and he was put into jail and later was executed on the charges of murder. This was the time when Benazir Bhutto came into politics and ran a campaign to save her father from the conspiracy charges but she failed to save him. Before Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's death, he passed the mantle of his political party (Pakistan People's Party) to her daughter who later became the heartthrob of her people and got elected as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988, following the legacy of her father. She was also ousted by another military coup just to be re-elected in 1996. She was forced into exile after two years when she faced corruption allegations against herself and her husband Asif Ali Zardari who was arrested and put into jail for eight years. She later returned to Pakistan to run PPP for the third term which ended in her assassination on Dec 27, 2007. Benazir Bhutto anticipated her murder even before her return to Pakistan and she blamed it on the hands of General Pervaiz Musharraf. She was a true demonstration of courage with the mixture of unyielding that people in third world countries find hard to comprehend.

I was pretty excited when I heard that a movie called Bhutto had been made. But this film is extremely disappointing. I'm sure people who know nothing of Bhutto will learn something, and perhaps the movie will appear novel to them. But this movie is a cursory examination of Bhutto. Go read the Wikipedia article on her and you will probably learn more.The film does take you through her life, but I found nothing of real interest there. There is no character analysis, so investigation of any controversy, no nothing. It's like its a high school students history essay on Bhutto.

A fascinating story of a woman and a family whose lives, like the Kennedy's in the US took on the dimensions of Greek myth or Shakespeare.The film-making itself is a little sedate and conventional, and the film feels a bit too much like hero worship (questions about Bhutto's failures and possible corruption are raised, but then raced by without much explanation). But whatever the complete truth of the politics (I'm no expert on Pakistan, I will admit) there's no question that this charismatic family changed history in Pakistan, with Benazir Bhutto being a truly revolutionary figure – the first female leader of a Muslim country (and one of the very short list of woman to ascend to power on the world stage). She championed both democracy and equal rights for women, saw her arraigned marriage bloom into real romance, all the while enduring terrible hardships and losses; seeing her family arrested, tortured and worse. She set an example for a moderate approach to Islam and government that seemed to give hope (to an outside observer at least) for a peaceful, non patriarchal, egalitarian future.

Bhutto (2010) is a frenetically overly edited documentary. The title suggests a study of the woman but it is rather a broad and omissive overview of the political history of Pankistan. The documentary begins with a sound bite from one of the most important and controversial interviews with Benazir Bhutto conducted by David Frost on the 2nd of November 2007. This interview is never referenced again possibly because it is too revelatory and against the establishment point of view. The omissive nature of the documentary mainly concerns US activity in Pakistan and Afganistan. Outright misinformation concerns Bin Laden and what is known as al-Qaeda.The best and most moving moments of the documentary are the interviews with the Benazir Bhutto's daughters and husband. It is of course true that Benazir Bhutto was a member of the elite establishment, in much the same way as John F. Kennedy but that background of privilege should not take away from their efforts towards peace and basic human rights. The result of their courageous struggle for peace and a better world resulted in the same fate.Pervez Musharraf living in elite comfort in the UK should be seen for what it is, state protection of a criminal.