Nitesh Tiwari’s latest film Bawaal has created quite a lot of controversy upon its release. Now, a Jewish human rights group has also taken umbrage to the Holocaust and Hitler references in the film, slamming the producers. The film uses a young couple’s learning of the sufferings of Jews in the Holocaust as a lesson to repair their relationship. But critics have said that the film approaches this is ‘tone deaf’. On Monday, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group shared such a critique of the film on Twitter, and attacked the makers.
The tweet read, “If the film’s shameless producers wanted to use such an outrage to gain PR for their movie they succeeded.” The group then asked the makers of Bawaal to remove the offending scenes or demanded that Amazon Prime Video delete it from their service. “They must immediately remove this ultimate trivialization of the suffering and systematic murder of millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust or @Amazon @PrimeVideo should delete #Bawaal from its service. Disgraceful,” read the tweet.
Bawaal debuted on Prime Video on Friday, as Oppenheimer and Barbie clashed at the box office. Directed by Nitesh Tiwari, the movie has been panned by critics, with many complaining about its troubling conflation of a couple’s troubled married life with the horrors of the Holocaust. The makers, meanwhile, claimed that the film has crossed 6 million views within first week of release and has been trending worldwide on Prime Video. Bawaal also stars Janhvi Kapoor, who plays a character with epilepsy. In the film, Janhvi’s character is ignored and emotionally abused by Varun’s character, Ajju. But when they go on a trip to important World War 2 locations, they discover that their personal problems pale in comparison to what the Jews went through during the Holocaust, and they return to India as changed people.