Janhvi Kapoor and Varun Dhawan’s Bawaal is in the eye of the proverbial storm for using the Holocaust to tell a story of marital discord, with a prominent Jewish rights organisation slamming it for “banal trivialisation” of the suffering of millions and asking Prime Video to take down the movie. The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, criticised the film for “outlandish abuse of the Nazi Holocaust as a plot device”. Directed by Nitesh Tiwari, Bawaal follows a high-school history teacher Ajay Dixit (Dhawan) and his wife Nisha (Kapoor) as they go on a Europe tour where they visit prominent World War 2 sites. The film goes into a graphic recall of the Holocaust in several scenes. It features “scenes in which the protagonists enter a gas chamber in Auschwitz and are suffocated while wearing striped clothing”, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre said in a statement released earlier this week. “Hitler is used as a metaphor in the movie for human greed, with the main protagonist, saying to his wife: ‘We’re all a little like Hitler, aren’t we’?’ Auschwitz is not a metaphor. It is a quintessential example of man’s capacity for evil”, said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, SWC Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action.

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