Film review: With Department, RGV tips over into the void

“Ram Gopal Varma on a roll is one of journalism’s guilty pleasures,” writes Meenal Baghel in her book, Death in Mumbai. I have no experience of RGV’s skills as a raconteur, but watching his films is swiftly becoming one of journalism’s forms of penance.

In Department, Varma casts Sanjay Dutt and Rana Daggubati as senior and junior encounter cops, Mahadev Bhosle and Shiv Narain respectively, in a sordid crime drama that he has recently described as “the other side of Company”. But it is difficult to believe they are the work of the same man. Comparisons to Company or Satya – films whose masterful characterisations and urban realist aesthetic made Varma the defining influence for a whole new genre of Mumbai underworld films – seem like a travesty when you’re watching a film as amateurish as Department.

Even at the height of his cinematic powers, Varma had a tendency towards excess. His penchant for deafening background scores, gravity-defying camera angles and menacing expressions was once put to more-or-less appropriate use in horror films, a genre he made his own with Bhoot (2003). Now these have become the unfortunate hallmarks of RGV’s cinema in general, whether he’s making a political thriller like Rakthacharitra (2010) or a sex-crime drama like Not a Love Story (2011). Since the mega-disaster of his supposed Sholay remake, Ram Gopal Varma ki Aag (2007), every film he releases sparks avid discussion on whether it will mark ‘a return to form’. With Department, Varma tips entirely over into the void.

First of all, the camera angles are outlandish, even by Varma’s usual standards. Instead of a single traditional camera, Department is shot using several Canon EOS 5D cameras, small cameras that can be fixed in the most unlikely places. In pre-release interviews, Varma has spoken of this technological innovation enabling him to “reinvent the cinematic language” in the hope that the audience “would feel the enhanced impact of what the characters are trying to express”. So forcing us to constantly look up at Rana Daggubati’s outsize torso as if we’re fallen at his feet is a way of experiencing the pain of being Shiv Narain? Well, my head certainly hurts.

Second, Department outshines most RGV films in the gratuitous violence department. Every scene – even an ostensibly emotional flashback in which Shiv Narain tells his betrothed Bharti how he first met his boss Mahadev Bhonsle (Sanjay Dutt) – is an opportunity to up the gore quotient. Bullets come whizzing directly towards us (blame those “enhancing” cameras), fresh fountains of blood spurt from every wound, character actors die like rats. And the more of this we’re shown, the less it matters.

Our total desensitisation is aided by the soundtrack, which could have skipped the details and simply overlaid the sounds of shattering glass and breaking brick walls over a regular stream of gunshots.

The worst part of the film, though, are its cardboard characters. It isn’t just that this is a world in which the ostensibly revolutionary female gangster character (Telugu actress Madhu Shalini) can only get screen space if she’s got something to roll round her tongue lasciviously, while the role of all wives – whether the yoga-practising Satya (an incredibly fake Lakshmi Manchu) or the bespectacled doctor Bharti (Anjana Sukhani) – is to swap recipes, chat prettily with their husbands’ political masters and defend what their husbands do, regardless of how many unarmed men they kill before dinner. It isn’t just that the police in this film are indistinguishable from the mafia, or that the mafia are indistinguishable from the politicians (represented here by Amitabh Bachchan as the caricaturish Sarjerao, who wears a tinkling bell on his wrist to – you guessed it – bajao everyone).

The problem with Department is that it takes this world entirely for granted; it doesn’t deem it necessary to provide any sort of moral compass at all, neither for its characters, nor for us. But as Sanjay Dutt says in one of Nilesh Girkar’s awful grandstanding dialogues: “Kisne kaha ki bekasoor ko sazaa nahi lagti?” Perhaps the moral of RGV’s tale is that there is no moral compass left.

But what we get is not a dark, self-conscious meditation on the internal rot within the Indian police. That is a film that is crying out to be made. Instead, Department is a strangely listless combination of adulatory policier and nudge-nudge-wink-wink tale about the corruption of power. The joke’s on us.

Published in Firstpost.

Book Review: Death in Mumbai

The Maria Susairaj murder has attracted all sorts of retellings, but Meenal Baghel’s fine book is the first that situates the story in the larger realities of Bollywood and India.

Death in Mumbai: by Meenal Baghel  Random House, pp: 231 Rs. 299. Meenal Baghel's Death in Mumbai is, quite simply, an unputdownable book. But while its subject, the 2008 Neeraj Grover murder, is undeniably among the most sensational crimes of our times, Baghel's book does not acquire its unputdownability merely from our prurient interest in the intimate lives of the accused – an aspiring Bollywood actress called Maria Susairaj and her naval officer boyfriend, Emile Jerome – or the notoriously gory details of the crime itself (though whether we want to admit it or not, those probably help). What makes Death in Mumbai such a compelling read is Baghel's ability to combine a fine-grained interest in the particulars with a sharp (but nicely understated) sense of the big picture. Her persistent, unsparing gaze is attentive to every possible detail – Maria Susairaj's fashionably cinched-at-the-waist tops slowly giving way to baggier clothes as she loses some of her tenacious grip on life, Inspector Raorane's thoughts on torture ("All this maar-dhaad is outdated...You have to read the profile of the person you are questioning and raise yourself to that level"), the pithy one-liners framed on the walls of the Asha Chandra Acting Institute where Susairaj once did a course ('If You Tell The Truth You Don't Have To Remember Anything'. And by embedding the minutiae of Jerome, Susairaj and Grover's individual histories within the larger matrix of their life choices and aspirations (and those of people like them), Baghel points again and again to the specificity of the post-liberalisation Indian experience. Her characters belong to a world that has come into being only in the last two decades: middle class girls whose good looks are no longer a passport to a good rishta, but promise an escape from enforced domesticity via the beauty pageant and the item number; young men for whom moving to Mumbai is also to move quietly but irrevocably out of the ambit of familial expectations; small town parents who have abandoned an older, sparer model of parenting for one in which it is deemed normal to fulfil their child's every desire: "Whatever he wished for, Neeraj got. Whether it was a kennel for his pet Silky, a Rs. 35,000 Nikon though Neeraj had precious little to do with photography, expensive clothes, a motorbike, a car." It helps that the book is superbly structured, successfully varying its pace to create a narrative that is as riveting as it is thoughtful. Baghel allows us the slow, pleasurable unpacking of a central figure (in chapters called 'Maria', 'Emile', 'Neeraj') while also managing to move between places and people with wonderful reportorial timing: a succinct pen-portrait of Mysore here, a father-daughter relationship explored neatly there, an anecdote supplied exactly where needed. When introducing police commissioner Rakesh Maria, for example, she is quick to tell us that he's renowned for his "gut feel", immediately following this up with a pacy account of how Maria cracked the connection between Tiger Memon and the 1993 Bombay blasts. Or again, while the section on Neeraj and his family comes almost at the end of the book, Baghel provides a poignant, revealing moment early on: Neeraj's father's half-baffled, half-awed realisation that his son is now in charge, that he'd become the adult in their relationship, the one whose decisions were not to be questioned. " 'After which both of you also come and live with me in Mumbai. You've worked long enough,' he'd said, accepting no argument. So this was how power shifted centre. Their boy had become his own man." Perhaps the most remarkable and unexpected part of this book is the middle section – entitled 'Oshiwara: Three Characters in Search of a Film' – in which Baghel devotes a chapter each to Ekta Kapoor, Moon Das and Ram Gopal Varma. Kapoor is the founder and head of Balaji Telefilms, where Neeraj Grover had once worked; Das is an aspiring item girl who played Susairaj in a low-budget film about the murder called Oh! Maria; while Varma is a well-known maverick filmmaker who made a film centred around Maria and the murder and "laughingly confessed to being 'half in love with her'". They are figures tangential to the primary narrative. But barring RGV, whose presence seems more to do with the admission that "Ram Gopal Varma on a roll is one of journalism's guilty pleasures", Baghel's ear for dialogue and eye for detail makes these chapters seem integral to her book. Moon Das's odd mix of virginal coyness and cultivated "sex symbol" persona, in particular, adds much to our understanding of women like her and Maria – not to mention the absolutely bizarre way that Moon's boyfriend's shooting of her mother and uncle resonates with Emile's (presumed) murderous rage. Far too many writers and publishers these days seem to believe that all writing a book about India needs is a bit of autobiographical meandering, a few anecdotes (from your driver, or perhaps from a train journey), followed by some grand pronouncements about how globalisation is changing everything (for better or for worse, depending on your political proclivities). Meenal Baghel, thankfully, doesn't set out to tell us about 'the new India' – but her tightly focused, scrupulously researched book is probably among the most insightful things you could read about it. Published in the Sunday Guardian.