Take Bawaaal off Prime Video for demeaning Holocaust, demands Jewish body in no surprise

Ever since the first trailer of Bawaal dropped, we were anxious about how Jews would react to the Hindi movie’s handling of the Holocaust. A romantic drama in which a troubled marriage is equated to a “World War” and it’s assumed that there’s “a Hitler in all of us”, Bawaal’s third act features the couple visiting the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp and reliving the mass genocide of Jews in a hallucinatory, black-and-white flashback. 

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Most of the reviews panning Bawaal pointed to how it trivialised a human tragedy in an absurdly tonedeaf manner. 

Now, Jewish human rights organisation Simon Wisenthal Center has requested Amazon Prime Video to completely remove the movie from its platform. Their complaints are centred on the “outlandish abuse of the Holocaust” as a narrative device. 

The group obviously had reservations with even specific dialogues such as Janhvi Kapoor’s protagonist saying, “Every relationship goes through its Auschwitz.” The fact that the movie also described Hitler’s propaganda-driven dictatorship as just an act of human greed (while erasing the overtones of ethnic cleansing) has not sat well with the Jews. 

"By having the protagonist in this movie declare that ‘every relationship goes through their Auschwitz', Nitesh Tiwari trivialises and demeans the memory of 6 million murdered Jews and millions of others who suffered at the hands of Hitler’s genocidal regime,” says the Center’s associate dean Rabi Abraham Cooper. 

Neither Prime nor Bawaal director Nilesh Tiwari have issued any statements in response so far. But this news comes as no surprise given how Bawaal actually walked down a slippery slope in tackling the Holocaust, a human tragedy that already is one of the trickiest historical events to joke about. 

And here we have a movie that is so fixated to insert Hitler as a third wheel between Varun Dhawan and Janhvi Kapoor.