When The Gods Fall (GF on Raavan)

Much as the cinematography of Mani Ratnam’s latest film has been (rightly) feted to no end, another regular Ratnam collaborator deserves as much credit with regard to the tone and obvious, overwhelming visual power of Raavan. A. Sreekar Prasad has been editing Ratnam’s movies since Alaipayuthey and nowhere is the impact of his skill as aggressive and consistent and important as it is with this film. The opening montage he and Ratnam stitch together is masterly—a hallucination of a scene that is cut with such precision and pulsating strength that it gets things off to a bone-rattling start while also, importantly, clueing us in to how this film will unfold, and what the political and personal stakes are. Every single shot here—from the coy tribal woman luring two horny policemen into a trap to the human bodies set aflame to the hugely energetic sight of Abhishek Bachchan rattling drums (he is the “conductor” here) to the sight of a hawk’s graceful flight past his towering frame, is important and carefully chosen. The result of the moment (aided immeasurably by an incredibly dynamic Rahman background score) and the film as a whole is an intoxicating whirlwind that feels every bit like what it is—an ancient myth meeting (or smashing head-first into) a modern storytelling technique.

As was the case in the last great Ratnam film, Kannathil Muthamittal, Raavan’s narrative at its most stripped-down core concerns a certain bourgeois complacency coming into contact with savage political reality. It is “Sita” (here Ragini, played very well by Aishwarya Rai) who frames this Ramayana re-telling—it is her arc that guides us. In the very beginning, she urges her “Ram” (or Dev – a superb Vikram) to basically man-up and find a good Dusshera moment to kill the “Raavan” of their story. We glean from this fleeting bit that Ragini is cavalier with regard to what it means to kill, and is fully-aware that her husband is an encounter-specialist type of policeman. A hit man for the state. By the end of the film it’s more than clear that Ratnam has given his Sita a far greater understanding about the cost and character of violence, and the concept of death is now invested with meaning because the victim is no longer a faceless, nameless concept perpetuated by agents of the state.

It is exactly this “facelessness” that Ratnam works vigorously against in constructing the emphatically multifaceted Beera character played with robust intensity by Abhishek Bachchan in a sadly, easily misunderstood performance. For all the stress placed on ten heads, a thousand names and all that, what this performance taps into is the most classical representation of the Ramayana’s characters by performers of any kind—the Kathakali dance drama. In a performance composed of several shades of greasepaint, facial ticks, violent, broad smiles, loud grunts and constant hand and body gestures, Abhishek and Ratnam seem to have devised a style of performance that conflates naturalism with dance-drama mudras and musicality. The result is sometimes awkward and funny, but it’s also very thoughtful, not only because, politically, this overwrought character-construct strongly highlights personal and cultural identity for an otherwise blindly “demonized” enemy of the state, but also because this “dance” of a performance is the very reason why Beera and Ragini are gradually drawn to one another in a plausible manner. They are both dancers—one by profession, the other in character. Their words say one thing, (typically expressing their enmity) but their gestures truly “speak”.

The Khilli Re moment is especially provocative in this sense. Here we have a moment of reverie experienced by Dev, who, mid-manhunt, seems to desperately want his wife back only so that he can then leave this jungle-hell and once again re-imagine his blissful, bourgeois domestic life—complete with pasta and wine (important given how much “local food” is privileged by one of the tribal characters) and picturesque views. Dev wants no part in this new world he’s been thrust into—he only moves forward, carves through its landscape and its peoples, to get what he wants. During this song interlude, we see Ragini again in her pre-kidnapping phase as a somewhat happily complacent and naïve person—perfectly underlined by her being surrounded by mirthful children who learn classical dance under her instruction while Dev walks around these scenes in uniform or conferring with his underlings. Ragini is a skilled, inventive dancer who, in Khilli Re, fuses her everyday with broad, stagey gestures (much like Beera) while her husband, interestingly, remains staunchly, almost aggressively stiff throughout the entire episode of Ragini’s “performances” here. It’s a masterstroke by Ratnam because on a superficial level, the Khilli Re song evokes a nice sense of marital happiness, but it also establishes a broad, underlying schism in this marriage. At baseline, these are two very different people.

Perhaps this is why the film is book-ended by two moments of a certain “blindness” being lifted from Ragini. The first time she is blindfolded by Beera, in the very beginning, the cloth is removed so that she is exposed to a ravishing, unforgiving new world and its harsh lessons about violence and oppression. The second time he blinds her, towards the end, the darkness is lifted to reveal a new and even bleaker truth about the nature of her own Ram. The man she claims at one point to be her “bhagwan” exposes a dark, obsessed side she sees for the first time, firsthand. At the center of Raavan is an act of unspeakable violence committed against a woman (played in the most affecting of all the performances by Priyamani) that is the cause of Beera’s fury and quest for vengeance. Ragini hears of this and is horrified, doubly so when she later realizes her husband might be capable of this kind of misogyny and “violence.” It is at this point, in the center, that it becomes clear that the gods have left the building. They are fallen, broken and in their shards emerge lesser beings—humans—who are never as simple as good or evil.

One of the many strokes of visual genius that connect to this idea is a mesmerizing piece of set design (Samir Chanda deserves every award coming to him) where Ratnam has an enormous, capsized statue of a god lying in repose across a large stream. It is here where Ragini turns to a “bhagwan” to pray for her lost naiveté, a return to her blindness to the problems outside of her personal, apolitical comfort zone. But that god, like all the rest, has fallen deaf, mute and inactive. This of course isn’t the only piece of imagery that’s simply stunningly provocative. Ratnam and Sivan outdo themselves at each turn—showing a level of thought that neither of them has brought to the table since their masterwork, Iruvar. Particularly interesting here is a shot showing Ragini falling from a cliff onto branches that catch her mid-fall—almost as if the landscape formed a “hand” and intentionally snatched her out of the air.

This certainly seems to be what Beera thinks—he replays the moment of her falling over and over again because, yes he respects her daring, but he also seems to see some meaning, some direction in this image. His world seems to have consciously decided to save this woman, forbidding his killing her. And therein begins his fascination with her. It is the natural world of this film that has decided to bring these people together. So many close shots are framed with a twig or some leaves in the foreground, so many moments include falling or running water moving things along (with a sense of inevitability) as if Sivan and Ratnam are telling us that the world is cradling these characters and carrying them along on their respective journeys. Even Beera cannot challenge the dictates of this dynamic natural world. So the fact that both he and Ragini never really make physical contact through the whole film (following the Kamba Ramayanam here, with one notable exception) doesn’t seem to matter because they are always connected by the “constant fluidity” of this world. The persistent spray of mist, the rainwater that moistens every frame, all of this also envelops and even binds the captor and captive. Beera seems to silently understand this. This Raavan is subservient to his own Lanka up to the very end. So the film’s final shot might on the one hand show Beera falling into the natural abyss, but it wouldn’t be wrong to posit that he is surrendering himself to the will of the world as it swallows him up entirely, assimilating him into its deep and now (to Ragini, to Ratnam, to us) eternally unknowable landscape. We lose the true bhagwan of this tale, watching him plummet to join the rest of the fallen gods.