Ramshackle Structure Becomes the Only Honest Way to Tell Phoolan Devi's Life

Shirin Neshat's new film "Phoolan" arrives as a formal disaster. The narrative sprawls, doubling back on itself, collapsing chronology into fragments that refuse to cohere into the tidy three-act shape audiences have learned to expect from biopics. Critics have already noted this, with the standard diagnosis: ambitious subject, wobbly execution, a film that bites off more than its structure can chew. But the actual diagnosis matters less than what the symptom reveals about this particular life.

In 1994, Shekhar Kapur made "Bandit Queen," the first major film adaptation of Phoolan Devi's story. That film, too, abandoned linear progression. It did not follow her rise and fall in clean sequence. Instead it moved laterally, circling back, fragmenting time itself into something closer to psychological texture than plot. Rape scenes interspersed with scenes of her gang's operations. Her childhood and her revenge existing in the same frame, temporally. The structure was read then as directorial choice, maybe even as an aesthetic signature. But look at what Kapur was actually doing: he was failing, formally, to contain a life built entirely on rupture.

Phoolan Devi's identity was not a progression. It was a shattering and a reconstitution. She was a low-caste woman, then a dacoit, then a political figure, then a parliamentarian, then a murder victim. Each identity negated the previous one. Chronological narrative assumes that a self accumulates, grows, learns. Her life was the opposite. Each act obliterated what came before. A coherent biopic grammar—scenes that build toward understanding—would be a lie about her specifically.

Neshat's ramshackle structure is not a flaw that the film fails to overcome. It is the only formal honesty available. The moment you impose conventional narrative shape on Phoolan Devi's story, you have already falsified it.

The real question is not whether this film works. It is whether you notice, when the structure refuses to settle, that you are watching fragmentation by necessity rather than accident. That recognition changes what happens when you encounter other resistance in your own work. Not resistance you need to solve. Resistance that is the point.