Locations in Europe: Russia, UK, Ireland, Germany
Storyline
Star(s): Vicky Kaushal
Songs/Dance: The narrative does not have any songs or dance sequences. There are some theme songs that were released as videos, with clips taken from the film.
Indian/ International Crew: Both Indian and international crew were hired for the film. The VFX supervision was undertaken by a Russian crew.
Language: Hindi, Punjabi, English, Russian
Executive Producer/ Line Producer: Elena Belkova, Co-executive Producer, Russia Lera Zingarevich, Executive Producer, Russia
Director/Producer: Directed by Shoojit Sircar, produced by Ronnie Lahiri and Sheel Kumar, Rising Sun Films, and Kino Works
Film Location Analysis
By Shikha Jhingan
The film shows Sardar Udham as a revolutionary figure who travels across different parts of Europe before he arrives in London. An extended sequence shows his first overseas journey to the USSR in 1931. The location for this sequence was Siberia. Sardar Udham is shown walking across a heavily snowbound landscape with five other men and a few horses carrying their belongings. After walking through very difficult terrain, the guide signals Udham to take a different route. Udham is now left alone to complete his journey. The visualscape, combined with a slow montage, captures a white, dreary, and expansive area that starts to appear larger while Udham becomes a diminutive figure. This use of scale in capturing the figure-ground relationship in an infinite snowbound terrain signals Udham’s inner quest as a revolutionary on a lonesome journey in this vast, interconnected world. The softer yet haunting registers on the soundtrack, with the sound of wind mixed with sustained drone music, add to this haunting and philosophical sequence.
The sequence that shows Udham landing at a port in London to go through an immigration check was shot in Russia with the help of green screens and VFX effects to recreate London. In an interview, Sircar said his film was not "about sets or big things, but purely about Udham." Since it is a character-driven film, the approach was to shoot "some small sections on the streets and use VFX effects. This is how we created this world." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZzoc8Y90qo
Another important aspect of the recreation was the change in the look of London’s skyline to grey, with smoke billowing out. This gave the city a damp, bleak look, which went with the soot-lined chimneys to evoke London's visual landscape in the 1930s, when coal was the main source of energy for heating homes and offices.
In the later sections of the film, the city is shrouded in darkness with frequent blackouts, while the streets are lined with sandbags to mark the period of World War II. As Udham walks through the streets, billboards, signage, street lights, vintage cars, docked ships, trams, red-coloured buses, and the uniform of the Metropolitan Police are used as important objects and infrastructural elements to recreate 1930s London.
The third important element in the recreation of locations was the use of media infrastructure to add density to the spatial and temporal context in which the narrative is located. The location for filming is dressed up visually with these objects and their sonic presence. For instance, in the first shot when the film moves into London, we see a building that is demarcated as Scotland Yard. As we move in, we see women as cable operators connecting telephone lines. The telegraph keeps buzzing, and we have a phone conversation between London and Amritsar.
In the sequence where we see Udham coming to London, a male newsreader’s voice on the radio announces signs of resurgence in the economy as he gets out of a taxi. Udham walks towards a dimly lit hotel, just as a news item announces Mussolini’s visit to Munich, which takes place in 1937. London’s spatial context is recreated with infrastructural details such as double-decker buses and red phone booths.
In the sequence just after the one where Udham kills General Michael Dwyer, several people are shown listening to news announcements on the radio or telephone calls. A street vendor is then shown selling a newspaper with reports of the assassination. The media objects described here add a dense sensory layer to these sequences, contributing crucially to the reconstruction of London within a specific temporal frame.
Additional Information & Links
A substantial part of the film’s narrative is located in London, where Udham is shown to follow and then assassinate General Dwyer. The director Shoojit Sircar decided to shoot the film in Russia. St. Petersburg was used as a location to stand in for London. The decision to shoot in Russia was based on taking into consideration the budget of the film. In an interview, Sircar explained that recreating London of 1930s and 40s would have been very expensive in London. The director and the production design team dug into archival material, watching BBC documentaries, Pathe films, still images from British archives, and Hollywood and British films to use as points of reference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhJplyo6e8k
The decision to shoot in St. Petersburg was also owing to an interesting historical connection with London. In an interview to Shweta Kaushal, Sircar revealed that during their research, they came to know that a Prince from St. Petersburg, who had family connections in the UK, had come to study in London. When he came back to St. Petersburg, he wanted to recreate a portion of the city as London. “That gave me an idea to see if there was a possibility to get some alleys, some roads, some streets and houses with some similarity,” adds Sircar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7H_Yl6nbcI
