Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays Ramanna, a serial killer, in the recently released Raman Raghav 2.0, loosely based on the story of the real Raman Raghav, who terrorised Mumbai in the 1960s. I found the film deeply disturbing not merely because of its theme and the gratuitous violence but due to its tendency to situate the serial killer's intentions in faux-philosophical gobbledygook.
Having killed 41 people by bashing in their heads with a rock, Ramanna tells the police he did this because his victims had disturbed his "game". "I would spend nights on the streets of Mumbai walking on the whites of the zebra crossing. I would not dare walk on black since doing that would mean I had lost the game," he says.
"When the vast road stretched ahead of me, I imagined it as all-white. But then someone or the other - a drunkard, say -would appear before me. I could not allow him to defeat me at the game, so I would kill him," he continues.
The film, rather than focusing on the severe mental illness of its protagonist, gives him a sickening allure, as though there was some rarefied explanation, inaccessible to the laity, for his actions. This feeling is compounded by the actions of the film's other main lead, Inspector Raghavan, played by Vicky Kaushal, who is also a serial killer but one who operates under the rubric of the law.
In the dock for killing two women, Inspector Raghavan finds an ally in Ramanna who is willing to take the blame for the inspector's crimes. That the film glamourises its deranged protagonists is bad enough, but it goes beyond by presenting them as special in their ability to connect viscerally with one another due to their shared derangement. "You and I are the same," Ramanna tells the inspector towards the film's end. "We make one another complete."
One wonders what Anurag Kashyap was aiming for with Raman Raghav 2.0. I am not suggesting that films should leave behind an uplifting message, or that they should be socially relevant, as the Censor Board chief Pahlaj Nihalani has suggested, but they must at the very least say something of value.
Kashyap's seminal work, Gangs of Wasseypur, was also filled with distasteful violence but that violence was situated in an ecosystem of moral clarity. The story of Sardar Khan and his progeny was a sprawling exploration of the coal mafia in Bihar after the dawn of India's independence. While none of the characters were monochrome, their existence in the screenplay counted for something that was more than its constituent parts.
Raman Raghav 2.0 offers no such narrative cohesion. Its protagonists, both men, are celebrated for a brokenness that is never earned in the course of the film. Their villainy is absolute, and Kashyap even does away with the formality of a back story that might give some insight into what makes them unthinking, murderous machines. The resultant narrative sorely lacks any heart that might endear it to the audience.
Film as a medium works when its disparate parts cohere into a satisfying whole. Whether the satisfaction so derived is moral or aesthetic (or both) is moot, but it must at least strive for one of the two. On recent evidence, Kashyap's work is moving away from a plane where it was visually captivating as well as creatively satisfying to one where it is neither.
His last film, Bombay Velvet, was a gorgeous evocation of the Mumbai of the '60s which, nevertheless, failed to reach the intensity of Wasseypur. It was as if, like his mentor, Ram Gopal Varma, Kashyap could only find success in a certain idiom, beyond which his films were in danger of becoming frightfully stilted. Sadly, Kashyap (again like Varma) learnt the wrong lessons from this. Aware that it is the dark and the grim that is his natural creative home, he has plumbed for the extreme, churning out films that provide no respite from the thickening gloom.
Kashyap's last film before Bombay Velvet presented mixed evidence of this failing vision. About a child's kidnapping that ends in tragedy, Ugly attempts to realistically portray the motives of a bunch of characters all of whom wish to benefit materially from the kidnapping. However, this realism is achieved at the cost of a chillingly bleak vision that offers no hope either for the characters' inner lives or for the film's setting, a predatory ogre that goes by the name of Mumbai.
Interestingly, while Kashyap's work as director is increasingly unidimensional, he has shown a remarkable breadth as a producer. His production house, Phantom Films, is behind some of the best films to emerge from Bollywood in recent times, including Lootera, Queen, NH10, and the latest, Udta Punjab. These films are taut exercises in realism, but their true achievement lies in their ability to furnish deeply affecting portraits of humans in turmoil.
Kashyap is too astute a filmmaker to not realise this discrepancy. One wonders if he has a plan in place or if he is destined to follow the dark demons and continue making films that slickly subvert all that is good and worth cherishing.
Every week, Eye Culture features writers with an entertaining critical take on art, music, dance, film and sport
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
