THE GRAHAM STAINES STORY

A more immediate crisis of efficacy emerges from the fact that Delhi Crime resembles a very recent Netflix film Soni which was in every way a superior work. The domestic disarray in the life of the female cops and the professional dynamics between two female officers in Soni is echoed here in the rapport that grows between the two cops played by Shefali Shah and Rasika Dugal, both in fine form, imbuing the contours of crime with an implosive reined-in anger at a system that fosters inequality and brutality. Shefali Shah is especially powerful. She is compelling because her anger is internalised, palpable. She not only anchors the series with her persuasive presence, she also diminishes and decimates the rather disturbing feeling we get that this sort of stark recreation of India's most well-known sex crime serves no purpose except to remind us that the change we hoped to see in the number of rapes in our country, never happened.

Nirbhaya lives, and dies, again. Long live Nirbhaya.

Subhash K. Jha

missionaries to take on impossible odds?

That's the question I wanted to ask as Stephen Baldwin's altruistic role of the Christian missionary filled up the screen with a sunlit dazzle.

Shooting the film in rural Odisha is just about the best way the director could have chosen to not allow the wild improbabilities of the plot (a newspaper editor hell-bent on proving Staines' conversion scheme turns out to be a leper's son). The characters and their environment exude the stifling air of a social condition that breeds inequality and disharmony.

ratification of his intentions.

Sharman is as usual, a portrait of earnest brilliance.

The Least Of These takes a very dangerous stand on the issue of conversion by whittling down the religious issue to a far deeper spiritual crisis.

At the end of the film the journalist speaks to us and draws a contrast between religious conversion and conversion from "nothingness to significance". There is a moment that can easily be seen as an attempt to glorify Christian evangelism and manipulate our emotions into submission, when Staines' wife is informed of the ghastly tragedy.

"I forgive those who have done this," Gladys Staines says when informed she has just lost her husband and two children.

Such a far-reaching level of forgiveness is hard to achieve in the human context. We can dismiss it as pamphleteering. And yet this is exactly how the real Mrs Staines had reacted. What sort of a passion drives the

Rural Odisha is captured by cinematographer Jayakrishna Gummadi with a striking lack of selfcongratulations. In this week's other release Notebook it is Kashmir and Kerala in Junglee. Is our cinema going back to its roots? But it's not where the story unfolds that matters in The Least Of These. It's the sheer barbarism of a religious order that championed tolerance that bothers us while watching this moving but dissatisfying film.

How many more Graham Staines to prove how dedicated we are to preserving our religious sanctity?

Subhash K. Jha