Rann Director: Ram Gopal varma
RAM Gopal Varma’s Rann opens with the sun glowering on a sweltering metropolis.
Inside the homes, however, the heat emanates from television, from news channels aboil with sensation mongering.
Within a short span, we are thrown amidst a battalion on the rims of the TV-news business — the patriarchal anchor Vijay Malik (Amitabh Bachchan), his smarmy competitor Amrish (Mohnish Bahl), Vijay’s son Jai (Sudeep), callow reporter Purab (Riteish Deshmukh), and the barbarous politician Mohan Pandey (Paresh Rawal), the vermilion patch on whose forehead resembles a victorious smear of blood after vanquishing a series of opponents.
The first words out of these mouths are invariably overarching opinions on the media. As such, some 15 minutes into the film, my worst fears seemed to crystallise. The moralistic subject matter and the message- ripe promos appeared to indicate fodder more appropriate to the Madhur Bhandarkar stables. (And indeed, Bhandarkar’s inexplicably feted Page 3 touched on several topics dear to Rann.) But as parallels to The Godfather began to creep in, and as Varma began to portray media men as corporate gangsters, I saw what could have interested him — the opportunity for another mythical meditation on men at work.
Regardless of the quality of his recent output, Varma is an entirely necessary presence if only because of his preoccupation with the workplace, a domain traditionally considered masculine, and a far shout from others who would rather deal with the home and heart, those traditionally feminine spaces. Rann is a muscular throwback to the archetypal masala movie (and how fitting that Bachchan, once again, returns as Vijay!) — an update of the David- Goliath template (think Arjun), with Purab invested with the irony of investigating the very men given the job of investigating the wrongs around them.
And yet, this ancient myth is thawed from its amber trappings and hauled to the modern day. The good guys are a distant presence in the first half, and even later, they must share space with their opponents, who dominate the screen. (Bachchan, therefore, is necessarily subdued amidst a spate of attention- grabbing performances.) Even the final victory of good over evil is Pyrrhic, obtained over great personal loss, and the villains aren’t quite brought to book in a fashion that would satisfy the strictures of the time-honoured black-and-white masala melodrama — their fate is a question mark hovering over our future. This is a morality tale with a conclusion that verges on the amoral.
Varma’s accomplishment in Rann is to transform an entirely predictable outline into an engrossing experience.
I don’t know that we want (or need) our films to poke our jaded selves into shocked action, but if it has to be done, this is the way to do it — with fervour and flamboyance.
Madhur Bhandarkar would do well to look and learn.