Disturbing, demented…
Raman Raghav 2.0
Director: Anurag Kashyap
Actors: Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Vicky Kaushal
Rating: ***
If you merely scroll down an otherwise uncannily reticent Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s filmography over merely the past three or four years, it’d be easy to sense how in such little time he’s displayed a body of work greater than the sum of several major actors’ careers. Another matter that he’d been around for donkey’s years, chiefly doing donkey-work, before Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur (2012).
With pretty much every other movie lately (Badlapur, Bombay Talkies, Bajrangi Bhaijaan), except when he’s saddled with a suave character (Aatma, Te3n), one is tempted to believe it’s Nawaz’s best performance yet. Raman Raghav 2.0 definitely is.
Who would want to be cast opposite him, when he’s in such top-form, especially when he’s technically playing the lead role? I don’t know. Vicky Kaushal (Masaan) in this film does. As an audience you feel sorry for him when he’s on screen, almost as much as you feel sorry for yourself. His portions sag the movie down. It’s hard to tell that’s because the character himself is rather weak, or the actor is. We tend to confuse one for the other usually.
Vicky plays a young IPS officer, with a ravenous appetite for hard drugs, namely cocaine, MDMA/ecstasy (pill; mixed in water), as against users of marijuana/hashish we’ve been used to for long on screen. At some level, his own drug habit reflects the changing scene in upper-class urban India, where casual consumers of coke (for instance) are just as common now as those taking toke used to be, until a few years ago. Yeah, coke is the new marijuana, now deal with it (Punjab’s not the only place where people are flying by the way).
But this sleep-deprived cop is anything but a casual drug consumer. Or is casual about anything apart from blood and sex. Opposite him, if you may, is Nawaz’s rag-picker type hungry street urchin who’s psycho, and by his own admission a serial killer.
Nawaz is Ramanna (or Raman), and Vicky plays Raghavan (or Raghav). This explains the title of this movie, I guess. Besides that there actually was a Raman Raghav in Bombay, where this film is set. Anyone who was around in the mid to late ‘60s in Bombay (or has seen Sriram Raghavan’s film on the same subject) would be closely familiar with Psycho Raman, or Sindhi Dalvai or Talvai, and his various aliases.
Nawaz’s Raman is very simply based on that Raman Raghav, with slight traces of Bombay’s Stoneman murderer (or whatever little we’ve imagined of him from Manish Gupta’s 2009 Bollywood film). The tragedy of Raman’s situation (so far as this film is concerned) is he’s only too willing to confess all his crimes, carrying a notebook with its details, even giving himself up to the cops at the local station. It also tells you how easy it is to get away with murder, slipping away into the squalor of urban jungles like Bombay.
An iron rod curvedly twisted at the end is Raman’s choice of weapon. The sound of that rod being dragged on concrete while he walks around in the dead of the night is enough to cause folds in your forehead. It’s unfortunate then that the movie’s background score is so second-rate. Maybe the filmmakers wished for a peppy score as tonal contrast to the movie’s severely dark mood. Perhaps in a very self-conscious sort of way it’s meant to help us absorb violence for what it is in the film—an early Tarantino kinda violence as legit pornography. Naah, doesn’t work (not in this case anyway).
What does, outside of Nawaz alone, is the sheer grime. No filmmaker I know has managed to bring to life the filth, the underbelly, and, yes there is no other word, the sheer grime, of India on to the screen as Anurag Kashyap has (right from Paanch, down to Ugly). Indeed his contribution to films over the past couple of years (or even in the long-run) far exceeds his work as director. Is this even close to his best? Nope, perhaps because there is, in that sense, hardly anything new. Does it jolt you still? Hugely, for the most part.
This is demented stuff, if you just lock your eyes and follow Nawaz’s Raman. As does the cop (Vicky). Is there more to this film than that? On the face of it, hardly. But if you take a car-jack and whack open the surface, there is an interesting bit about how killing for sheer thrill (or as scary outlet for male desires and frustrations) explains much of terrorism, and riots across the world. Pyscho Raman doesn’t hide his blood-thirst behind ideology (or religion, or politics). The state of course holds monopoly over violence. The rich cop in this movie is just as much a psycho. But hey, that’s almost kinda okay. Pouf, that thought however true is only as disturbing as this movie that rightly doesn’t claim to be an easy-watch.
Mayank Shekhar’s book NAME PLACE ANIMAL THING, part-serious, part funny non-fiction on desis and pop-culture, is available online and at leading bookstores