Many a times people because of their habit of not reading choose to see bad reputed stories which could be counted on fingers to know about Hasan Manto. Director and producer
Nandita Das has also used this same shortcut. If you have read about Manto and are familiar to his stories. Then Nandita’s stories is of no use for you. If you know nothing about his stories then you are going to gain nothing from the movie as it’s just a small portion of it. It’s very much better to know Manto through his writings and then understand him. Nandita’s weak script focuses on his early times that’s how he got connected to film world of the Mumbai. They have showed his marriage life to the dispute between Ismat Chugtai and Krishna Chandar but in a very uninteresting way. The second part of the film is about the time when India’s got parted and he went to Lahore ( Pakistan) . While he was living in India his stories were put up in the court because of the sexual content in it and stories written in Pakistan like ’Khol Do’ and ’Thanda Goshat’ were unbearable to the Nizams. Financial problems, dispute among the writers because of his content, was favoured from no one, and court cases led to depression which made him a drunkard. Because of this the results were that he slowly started dying. Manto has a great charter to which there’s no justice in the movie. In the movie Nawazuddin Siddiqui became Manto. His wife’s role was played by Rasika Duggal. Even though Nandita had good actors still she couldn’t do justice to biograph of Manto.