[Might contain spoilers, a lot of them.]
There is a little detail from Home Alone
that I recalled quite suddenly when I was watching Anurag Kashyap’s new film, a
detail that gave me much amusement. It was insignificant, really, but I am
puzzled by why it came to me out of the blue, and why it seemed to be relevant.
In Home Alone, Kevin watches a grim and violent gangster film that
terrifies him, and the film is titled – believe it or not – “Angels With Filthy
Souls.” By the end of this film I
couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony. Oh, how wonderfully the title would
have worked here! But I digress.
Early in Raman Raghav 2.0, we see a madman who has just surrendered to the
police describing one of the murders he committed. Quite suddenly –
significative of his nature, perhaps – a casual story becomes a confession, and
it indicates that he is not of sound mind. We are entranced by the acting on
display, but here’s the problem: As much as we would have liked to soak it up,
we cannot. The music is terribly distracting. This sequence needed silence. This
actor needed to be left alone to do his job. The music accentuates the
character’s unstable mind, our first glimpse of it, but it doesn’t need to.
Take the music out of the sequence and we have a truly spectacular one, where
the actor in question effortlessly displays his potential and his ability to
take a standard scene and do something extraordinary with it for the umpteenth
time.
And it doesn’t end here. Very little in the
film works and it is such a shame. Kashyap is back in familiar territory here, working
with a small cast and largely driving the plot using atmospherics, juxtaposing
the murkiness of Mumbai’s underbelly against the murkiness of the human
conscience. It is an idea that looks intriguing on paper. However, when it
takes shape on the big screen, it becomes a muddled mess of man chasing man, of
man killing man. It’s ugly. In his previous films, this sort of ugliness had a
way of keeping us hooked. Gangs of
Wasseypur found mood in its violence. Raman
Raghav 2.0 tries to find a footing. It is a story of two men on either side
of the law united by a penchant for violence, emotional and physical, but the
violence here has little meaning. Most of it is carried out without emotion,
like an everyday activity. Scene after scene of an iron rod being dragged
around, of it splitting a skull open, of blood spilling does little to tell us
more about the character perpetrating it except he’s a psychopath who does not
seem to care. And scene after scene of the junkie policeman ill-treating his
woman tells us that he’s perpetrating a violence that is not physical, that
does not leave a bloody trail. It’s an interesting concept that needed more
ironing out. Because Raman Raghav 2.0,
miraculously, is flat. And “flat” is an adjective one would never have associated
with a film helmed by Kashyap until now. At least I would not have done so.
One thing I have consistently admired about
Kashyap’s cinema is how he manages to make his characters seem like people who
have inhabited the world he creates for a long time. They seem born into it. It
lends so much credibility to the film, lends it an energy that he uses so well.
But I did not get the same feeling as I watched Raman Raghav 2.0. These characters never commanded my attention nor
were successful in upholding it when they had it. The lines they uttered lacked
the characteristic sharpness of his writing. Gone are the days when his ear for
Mumbai’s street lingo (Satya;
co-written with Saurabh Shukla) made us marvel. Gone are the days when the
city’s colors and sounds (Black Friday) he captured made us sit up and
take notice. He still has a wonderful ear for the lingo and an eye for locales,
but Raman Raghav 2.0 is not a
creature of the city. That the city does not play a major part in this film is
its undoing. It really puzzled me why Kashyap, who captures Mumbai in all its
grime and glory quite unlike his peers, didn’t use it more.
However, there are some redeemable moments.
Kashyap really shows a flair for infusing a seemingly ordinary sequence with
dark humor in a chapter titled “The Sister.” What if your psychotic sibling
turns up at your doorstep one day after many years and asks for a little
harmless help? The creative possibilities are endless. It could make for a
tense story that allows the audience a sigh of relief in the end or a more
casual one but with a terrific twist. Kashyap goes for both here. It’s a
superbly controlled chapter, where each line carries weight and each expression
adds to the tension. We are allowed a little relief before it bounces back with
a bite. We recoil but not without a small chuckle. Now, that is some sequence! Nawazuddin Siddiqui is
reliably brilliant here, bringing fury and menace to his role with aplomb.
Vicky Kaushal and newcomer Sobhita Dhulipala do extremely well in their
respective roles, adding layers to their drearily written characters. I was particularly
impressed by a scene of theirs where he waves a gun at her, threatening her
without bothering to mince words, evidently proud of his masculinity and his
ability to not care for a fellow human being. His aggressiveness stems from his
addiction to coke. In the middle of his threat, she casually answers a call
from her mother, leaving him dazed and speechless. After the call ends, she returns to the conversation almost lazily with “So,
what were you saying?” It’s a line that swiftly reduces him to a nobody. It
underlines his vulnerability and hollowness. The masculinity is only a façade.
We discover who the stronger person is here, and we don’t need someone who
flexes their muscles for that.
Some months ago, I watched a 1997 Japanese
horror-thriller called Cure, about a
policeman with some domestic troubles on the trail of a most unusual serial
killer. It was a slow and complex film that went places, explored many ideas
and ended on a high. The patient viewer was rewarded. It did not explore the
fascination a serial killer has for someone out to hunt him, but it did a
splendid job of exploring his demented mind. The pattern of violence in that
film had meaning. It was integral to the story. Its inclusion in the film wasn’t
purely for shock value. Raman Raghav 2.0 is no Cure, but it had potential if only it wasn’t so repetitive. We know
how it is going to end, and it disappoints us by taking the safest route there.
And the safest route is usually the most predictable. Such a letdown.
(Not For Reproduction)
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