Over the last few years, my interest in contemporary Hindi
films has plummeted; perhaps my move to Bombay has played a part in my
diminished engagement, as no longing for home, no desperation for a whiff of
its scent clouds my vision. Largely,
though, it is a function of the increasing soullessness of the industry’s
“mainstream” products (and the films are increasingly products rather than
embodiments of a living tradition), and also because the “off-beat” films
themselves are often formulaic, intellectually timid and irredeemably – there’s
no other word for it – bourgeois once one gets past the edgy attitude. Old habits die hard, however, and I still end
up watching many – I just don’t enjoy the experience as much as I used to, even
if the thrill of anticipation as I find my seat in the hall and wait for the
film to begin, hoping for trailers to delay the moment of gratification, and my
willingness to give myself over to the experience (until the film itself jars
me out of attentiveness first), remain the same. Through it all, very few films surprise me –
and not in the sense of plot twists (I hardly ever guess those, being much more
likely to live in the present of the scene before my eyes, as it were), but in
the sense of taking me somewhere I hadn’t expected to go, or showing me a
glimpse of something I hadn’t expected to see.
That I expect these from cinema at all reminds me that I’m not yet
jaded, merely disappointed.
Raanjhana surprised me.
Based on the trailers, I went to the cinema expecting a Hindu-Muslim
love story (and yet another one where the heroine is Muslim) set in “the
heartland,” one of those contemporary films targeted at urban multiplex
audiences that purport to be set in small towns in U.P. or Bihar, but at the
cost of the place’s specificity.
Raanjhana isn’t that sort of film: its evocation of Varanasi (a city I
once had the pleasure of spending a few days in years ago) is quite specific,
but more important, it does not present its lead, Kundan Shankar (Dhanush, who
is fantastic here) as some kind of typical heartland hero: he remains odd, a
man both in and out of place, throughout the film. Combined with Rahman’s superb, mellow and
rich soundtrack, which director Anand Rai uses better than most, these are
reasons enough to watch the film on the big screen. But there’s more: the film is often offensive
(primarily in its gender politics), but it is about as close to raw as a Hindi
film is likely to get (it not only features some of the most searing dialogs
I’ve heard in a while; but uses words to wound, not simply gore or curses), and
made me uncomfortable – a welcome respite from the mediocre timidity that
dominates even “new” Bollywood.
Dhanush is excellent as a Tamil Brahmin from Varanasi,
permanently stuck in his boyhood love for the (much more affluent) Muslim Zoya
(Sonam Kapoor). Dhanush has built a
career in Tamil films precisely by leveraging the audience’s surprise that he
isn’t the sort of guy you would expect to see as the male lead in either North
or South, into cinematic impact; his shrewd film sense, and a kind of bemused
intensity, only help. “I’m odd, perhaps
even absurd” he seems to say, “but this is how I am.” That singularity is his signature: he is
obviously heir to an entire tradition in Tamil cinema, but is like no-one else.
And, unusually for a relatively young actor, he is able to suggest the passage
of time with barely any effort. We see
this in Raanjhana, where he seems every inch the school boy in his disheveled
uniform, and then, eight years later, a neighborhood tapori. Dhanush channels the Benares ghats,
neighborhoods, and, memorably, the rooftops so well that when the action shifts
to Delhi, he doesn’t seem to belong on the JNU campus – the actor has been too
successful in convincing us that he belongs to Benares, no less than his
namesake deity, for us to believe him inhabiting any other urban space. With his female co-star, the passage of time
is about the props (pigtails and schoolgirl dress earlier on, and adult clothes
and metro-lingo later on); but Dhanush doesn’t need a makeover – he simply
acts. And holds the viewer’s attention
throughout a rather uneven film with his commitment; not for nothing are the
film’s best, rawest dialogs given to him.
“I’ll marry the same day as you,” he tells Zoya when holding her tight
but knowing she won’t be his, “even if I have to get married to a black
bitch.” The words sting, especially in
the Hindi that says “kaali kutiya”; neither the filmmakers nor Dhanush are
scared of veering from the anodyne, of drawing some blood.
The same cannot be said of Zoya: Sonam Kapoor is always
lovely and (a rarity among her peers) classy, but her character – spirited yet
submissive; U.P. Muslim and a classical dancer, utterly modern yet inhabiting a
gorgeous old haveli – is too made up, too much a figment of the male writer’s
imagination (that is to say, of the maleness of the writer’s imagination) for
her to hold her own against Dhanush. The
film is not as interested in knowing her as it is Dhanush, and the suspense
lies in figuring out what she will do (which, in the logic of Hindi film
romances simply means, will she fall in love with the this or that man?). He cuts deep; she stays closer to the
surface. Zoya’s flatness, her filmi
conventionality, is, along with the introduction of Abhay Deol as a laughably
unconvincing leftie radical, an early sign that Raanjhana might end up giving
less than it promises: aside from the music, Benares and Dhanush, will there be
a there here? By film’s end, the answer
is clear, and it isn’t gratifying.
Dhanush is crucial to the film’s credibility, but the film falters every
time it turns elsewhere.
Rahman’s soundtrack is itself one of the film’s surprises:
on first listening to it I was underwhelmed by how light and mellow it seemed,
but something about it meant I had to keep listening, and began to appreciate
its resonance. It lingers, and works
well as an album, the songs on the CD building up to the rich tapestry of “Tum
Tak.” Rai is equal to the task, and
apart from “Tum Tak” (which, counter-intuitively, occurs very early in the
film), “Piya Milenge” is outstanding, while even the relatively conventional
settings of “Ay Sakhi” and “Banrasiya” are elevated. Only “Tu Manshudi” suffers from a hangover
(that of Rang de Basanti), but with music like this, complaints can only be
muted. More broadly, Rai is as sensitive
as Rakeysh Mehra to the dramatic possibilities inherent in using Rahman’s
background music (and in turning that music off). The two outstanding scenes (neither of which
can be described without spoilers) both feature Dhanush, the first associated
with the big post-interval twist and a panic-stricken Kundan in flight; and the
second a wonderful vignette a few minutes later by the banks of the Ganges,
involving Kundan’s encounter with a sage Brahmin.
Unfortunately, none of this (nor the moving Dhanush
monologue that concludes the film) is enough to rescue Raanjhana from itself,
as it wends its way from Varanasi to Delhi and becomes overtly political in the
last third, degenerating into wretched farce.
I was bitterly disappointed watching this film betray itself, the
promise of an unusual story about two people giving way to the usual bourgeois
platitudes on what politics and political activism can be. This stale, hackneyed representation, the
sheer fakery of watching the film’s characters try and build a left-of-center
political party in Delhi (the dialogs mouthed by the JNU jholawaala students
caused me to cringe in my seat, embarrassed at the writing), badness that
verges on parody, marred what had been, up to that point, an authentic
movie-going experience. The failure is
more than just Rai’s: this generation of Hindi filmmakers can imagine many
things, but politics isn’t among them (and, it must be said, the impoverishment
of the imagination on this front itself speaks volumes about the politics of
both filmmakers and audience). Moreover,
the fact that there even is an overtly political dimension to this film is
itself part of the problem, and in this Raanjhana is a long way away from the
new Tamil cinema forbears to which it pays homage. Those films do not need politics as a prop,
and are secure in the view that a story about a romance, or neighborhood
friendships, or the world of a fairground or cockfighting, is inherently
meaningful (even if, all too often, Tamil filmmakers feel the compulsion to
invent a violent twist to jolt the audience, an overused gimmick that by now
has conditioned the audience to expect it).
Writer Himanshu Sharma, it seems, suffers from some anxiety on that
score, and the result is a film that tries too hard to be Important and
Meaningful (without having anything more important or meaningful to say than
that the government is bad, and, by implication, that the politics of the
youthful is the country’s only hope).
The capitalization is painful – the film was better off merely odd.
2 comments:
Good to see you're back. Thoroughly satisfying review.
Nice review. But my favourite one, which made me cry was this:
http://thelinesofbeauty.blogspot.in/2013/06/on-raanjhanaa.html
Also rans:
http://baradwajrangan.wordpress.com/2013/06/22/raanjhanaa-568-6765437324-89467/
and also this:
http://magikcinemagik.blogspot.in/2013/06/raanjhanaa-some-musings-on-love-lost.html
And
http://mtv.in.com/blogs/movies/reviews-and-previews/raanjhanaa-celebrates-pain-of-heartbreak-50229139.html?india
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