Sympathy for the devil

It is impossible to settle down to Raavan with no expectations. It is not merely a new release, it is a Mani Ratnam film and will be judged alongside the director’s famed achievements, including Bombay and Dil Se. Raavan would have fared better coming from a mediocre director. The viewer can’t help but feel that it has missed the Ratnam mark.

Opening with great promise, the credits roll to A R Rehman’s Bheera Bheera, the best song on an otherwise tepid soundtrack. The plot revolves around a love triangle consisting of Bheera (Abhishek Bachchan), a local self-styled Mafioso and his kidnap of Ragini (Aishwariya Rai) who is the wife of Dev (Vikram), a policeman. The film follows Dev’s search for his wife along with a forest trooper (Govinda) and a platoon of policemen all making their way through an impossibly verdant forest. The plot’s not much to write home about but that’s always been Ratnam’s thing — taking the ordinary and re-imagining it in the most unexpected way.

His aptitude for imagery has not failed him. Raavan is a colonialist’s fantasy. Raavan should replace the current Incredible India campaign. It’s all sumptuous forests, wild rivers and steep ravines, captured in eye-popping colour. There were even some bare-chested, painted natives running around in the forest.

That’s the problem with Raavan, there is just much too much going on. Too much colour, too many action sequences — it’s all stunning till it becomes stunningly repetitive and ever so slightly self-indulgent, a director showing off his hobbies rather than taking the trouble to craft a narrative. Do we really need to see Aishwariya Rai plunge from a cliff, find herself tangled in a tree top and land ever so gently into the sea three times in slow motion?

While Abhishek Bachchan has come a long way as an actor since his Refugee days, particularly with his performance in Yuva, this shall not be remembered, if there’s any justice, as his best work. He snarls, growls, and strikes menacing poses to prove to us what a menacing bad-ass Bheera really is. It’s unconvincing and by the end of it, one just wishes to recommend medication for his melodramatic tantrums.

As for his other half, the lovely Ms Rai, well, first the good news — the camera absolutely loves her. She looks like a million bucks and Ratnam makes great currency of her beauty. Whether or not she can strictly be called an actress rather than a mere clothes horse is still up for debate. In this film she delivers at best a one-note performance. However, if the Filmfare awards next year open up a category for best acting done by twitching your eyebrow or flaring your nostrils, Rai is a shoo in.

Not to say that Raavan wasn’t entirely without its moments. The highpoint surely was the breakthrough performance from Tamil actor Vikram in his first Bollywood feature. Vikram exudes the sort of screen presence many an actor would die for, with the swagger of a young Brando and a crackling sexual chemistry with Rai that is far more convincing than her lacklustre on-screen relationship with her off-screen husband. Govinda’s scenes were solidly good, as one would expect from that consummate Bollywood professional.

All in all, one leaves wishing Raavan had been a different type of film, where less was more, where the spectacle of the film was supplemented with more complex protagonists, a film which better reflected the skill Ratnam displayed in his earlier classics.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 4^th, 2010.