On Rangan and Ratnam’s Conversations…

At the heart of Baradwaj Rangan’s first and very special book is a calm but tightly focused tug of war that, at its core, wonderfully dramatizes what is possibly the most important conflict within mainstream film studies and film writing in India. Put plainly, I’m talking about the debate between those who take an analytical approach to the movies, and those who resist the very same as a purposeless, overly “intellectual” pursuit. Whatever side of the fence one falls on, it’s hard to conceive of a more appropriate pairing to take on this dialogue. In one corner we have Rangan who, over the past decade or so, has established himself as the finest, most consistently insightful writer on film in India. Facing him as both a subject and a kind of sparring partner is Mani Ratnam, the director who has for more than two decades offered Indian cinema some of its most memorable treasures and transformed its landscape with the force of his influence. As evidenced in some of the exchanges here, (to make no mention of his work itself) Ratnam is a great believer in the ability of mainstream cinema to be something that’s both artful and entertaining.

Despite this belief, the director doesn’t fully cross over to the other side, where his films are examined with an eye for symmetry—for resonating themes and dovetailing ideas that, over the course of a career might help to explain and understand an important artist and in turn accurately place him in various historical and cultural contexts. Rangan to his credit doesn’t entirely let Ratnam off the hook. There’s a sense in these pages that the writer is aiming to hold the filmmaker accountable for what he’s done to shape the course of Indian cinema and to take an active part in examining his work both by sifting through the minutiae within individual films and by stepping back to look at his body of work as a whole. If Ratnam resists these attempts to varying degrees, I think it’s because of something he quite interestingly hints at throughout the book—that he’s not a director who, during the course of a film’s production, can “see” the entire film in his head. He can’t envision the final product when he’s in the middle of a shoot and more often than not during these conversations, he’s prone to offering more in-depth and meaningful thought with respect to individual scenes, moments and people than he is with respect to the broad strokes of a given film and how it might be connected to the films that came before or after it. This is not to say that these insights don’t exist, quite the opposite. Rangan clearly reads between the lines of Ratnam’s responses, and steers the conversations appropriately. One of the book’s great charms is what happens when the conversations derail—straying from the focus of a given chapter to address future Ratnam films or those from out of the past. It is in fact these “timeline fractures” in an otherwise linear set of exchanges that shed light on what is possibly the book’s greatest insight on Ratnam.

With the exception of Dil Se, Ratnam’s own films in a post-Iruvar age, (as the director himself posits, I believe that this masterwork is not only his greatest film, but also the point of no return for his career—a moment where a set of interests, both aesthetic and otherwise, crystallized) have consistently been structured in ways that avoid a typical unraveling of linear time. Ellipses have existed in Ratnam’s films before Iruvar, of course, and both men point this out with films like Nayagan and Mouna Ragam offered up as examples. But Iruvar, with its condensed narrative, its interest in memory and the mutability of politics, history and relationships, remains Ratnam’s most singular and defining effort—like almost no single Ratnam film that came before it, even if it is marked by the influence of multiple older Ratnam works. And the Ratnam films since Iruvar have all, in one way or another—whether it’s in Yuva’s broken timeline, Alaipaayuthey and Kananthil’s fragmented personal histories, Guru’s decades-spanning plot or Raavan’s lack of exposition—owed a debt to that 1997 feature. As an artist, Ratnam’s concerns since the release of his most important work—and as sporadically evidenced in works before it—have clearly centered on the messiness of personal and political histories. “Messiness” borne not only out of the intrinsic dramatic conflicts within these histories but from Ratnam’s efforts to reconfigure how they play out. Ratnam doesn’t like to spoon-feed his audience as he himself admits to Rangan, and his vision might support that idea above all else. His films tell us that time and people don’t operate in convenient ways—that pasts and presents often collide in order to shape futures. At their best and most engaging junctures, these conversations capture this idea rather remarkably.

One can take issue with Rangan not hammering away at his subject with a little more force at certain points (I don’t) but my central criticism of this book is an unfair one. Like Rangan, readers such as myself feel quite possessive of Ratnam and, as is wont for those of us who see him as a visionary, I had hoped the chapters would go on longer when discussing subjects that I had a serious personal interest in. I wanted to hear Ratnam on Karthik and Mohanlal, Ratnam on his contemporaries in Indian cinema, Ratnam on the Hindi films that shaped his film memory. I wanted a longer book! At one point, during the chapter on Iruvar, Ratnam discusses unused scenes shot for the film and Rangan asks him if he’ll ever release these on DVD. Ratnam replies that they don’t exist—that all the footage is gone. It’s a very brief exchange and they move on quickly, but I found this to be heartbreaking. Not simply because of the place I accord Iruvar but because the idea that film memory can be discarded in this way, especially with regard to certain films and filmmakers, is rather troubling–even if it’s typical for Indian cinema and ultimately works to exacerbate the greater institutional problems with film studies and writing that books like this resist admirably. Rangan and Ratnam’s most important achievement in giving us these memorable conversations, then, might well be the vital act of film preservation that they represent. And if there are questions that remain unanswered in these pages, perhaps the lesson is that Rangan’s book should be treated the same as Ratnam’s films—with a close, thoughtful reading that allows for and even appreciates ellipses.