GF on Rakht Charitra (1 & 2)

The first part of Ram Gopal Varma’s grim, ambitious, schizoid Rakht Charitra is easily the filmmaker’s most interesting, viscerally gripping film since Company in 2002. As a standalone film there is enough in Varma’s sordid, messy, blood-spattered opener to mull over. There is also enough violence here to give Mel Gibson a complex. The blood-lettings don’t occur without some thought or feeling, though, as here, acts of violence become a kind of currency for the film’s world and its sociopolitical “industries”. This is a universe where rivals are embattled in an epic war and barter in hideous acts to out-monster one another.

If in this world monstrous violence acts as a kind of currency, Abhimanyu Singh’s Bukka Reddy is its wealthiest character. This guy, as written and as scarily played by Singh, is possibly Hindi—or Indian—cinema’s most revolting and vile villain, and it makes a lot of sense that he sprang from this mind. Rakht Charitra is most successful for Varma as a fusion of two of his great genre interests—the gangster film and the slasher/horror show—conflated here into one gruesome, ghastly vision of the world. It’s probably the film that represents the summa of his subject interests (if not his most balanced and complete vision – Company remains the testament to that) and in this sense Bukka Reddy—a kind of political gangster and supernatural monster rolled into one, is the centerpiece of the show, even as the ostensible “hero” (if such a word can be used for anyone in this) is the Pratap (Paritala) Ravi character played excellently by Vivek Oberoi. This film is like a hallucination. An entire local history is condensed in two-hours and the great achievement here is the speed with which it moves, hacks, cleaves its way through all of this epic material. Varma’s technique which usually overwhelms everything in nearly any given post-Company film is itself (mostly) subservient to a narrative too twisted, too insane, too eventful, to be overtaken by even the worst of this director’s habits. The result—in the first film—is his best and most potent work in years.

It’s not just the pace or the possible restraint, though. Rakht Chairtra’s English title has been translated as “A History of Blood” and this film’s interests are certainly connected to history. As a political tract about power and oppression, Varma’s work exceeds the posturing of the Sarkar films and certainly as a statement about the birth and twisted modern state of the nation, it is an immensely more interesting product than what came out of Varma’s previous feature, Rann. Rakht Charitra seems at first to side with rebellion, bloody rebellion against oppressive power structures made by and of men who deem themselves higher by any arbitrary or historical standard they devise. The film’s prologue begins with the image of Gandhi, and the futility of his idealistic non-violent symbol in post-Independence India, (his smiling statue overlooks a gory murder) where the well-intentioned, by-the-books reformers—like Pratap Ravi’s father—eventually hit a wall in the form of an immovable, easily manipulated power structure. This prologue ends excellently as the firebrand reformer turns to arms, is subsequently killed by one of his corrupted people, and ultimately has the burden of his freshly violent revolution placed on the shoulders of his sons. The film from this point to its end becomes the story of sons who are embroiled in their fathers’ wars. Importantly, Pratap’s first true act of violence occurs not in response to his father’s death but as a result of his older brother’s murder—and the instant that this fate has been revealed to him, the law of succession kicks in as Pratap immediately inherits mantle of violence, his personal call from history—unfolding here in a superb, classic one-guy-against-six masala fight sequence. This is not the only moment dramatizing a violent inheritance. Bukka Reddy could only be the kind of a monster he is under the tutelage of an incredibly corrupt, irresponsible, power-hungry father. When this father is dispatched at Ravi’s hand, Bukka’s monster becomes—almost impossibly—crazier. He is perpetually restless, a sweating, salivating, simmering madman who explicitly says he is haunted by his father’s ghost, that the ghost rests in his own body now, and he is sleepless with the old man’s need to be avenged at any cost. It is fitting that the father of the nation opens this film, as it is a film about fathers and sons, about the inheritance of a bloodied history. Consequently it is the Mahatma’s non-violent ghost that ironically—and perhaps purposefully, for Varma—continues to haunt every brutally violent frame of both chapters.

And Gandhi is not the only icon to appear and “witness” an act of terrible violence. Midway through the film, the man who murdered Ravi’s father is cornered by Ravi’s men in front of an enormous mural of Shiva. Before he dies, the man pleads with the painting, asking his mute, expressionless god to remind his assassins—led by Ravi—that they will be punished for murdering him. The image of the god is of course silent, but Ravi speaks in its place, assuming the voice of the god, telling his victim that he fully understands his fate and ultimately butchering the man to death. This is an important moment in its recalling the prologue. Two murders in front of two icons—one political, one religious—that are voicing two very different ideas. One of these icons pleads against violence as a means to any end; the other condones and even endorses vengeful destruction. Later, when Shatrughan Sinha’s NTR incarnation, Chief Minister Shivaji, is confronted for his condoning Ravi’s violent ways, Shivaji argues that even characters from scripture had to shed blood to do good—again linking violence to religiosity. Framed in this way, Rakht Charitra can almost be viewed as Varma’s vision of modern India as a nation “stuck” or  pulled between two concerns—two impossible duties. This film places its characters and their history in an intractable position, fixed in a limbo between the will of god and the call of a nation. Given this overarching duality, it makes a lot of sense that the central conflict ultimately comes down to a struggle between two men here. The first chapter ends with Ravi rendering violence obsolete by wiping his hands of it, becoming a politician, turning to the business of the nation—in this way turning his back on god—and thereby meting out a final defeat to Bukka Reddy, who literally weeps when Ravi’s transition to politics is secured. Reddy no longer matters when the terms of the debate have been shifted away from the source of his significance—violence. Appropriately, given his unbelievably disgusting acts against women, (one of the film’s blights is its unctuous scenes of suggested rape) he is ultimately murdered by a group of men disguised in burqa—important not only for its gender subtext but also for its religious meaning because in a universe in which the Hindu gods “appreciate” and even reward violence, it can only be emissaries of another faith that brings this universes’ greatest monster to his end.

But duality cannot be denied. Just as Varma drops the curtain on this first story, showing Ravi happy, complacent in his spotless khadi, and “abolishing” goondaism in the state—the ghost of violence reappears in the form of a new warrior (an immediately arresting Surya) emerging in an epilogue that gives us a glimpse at the second part of Rakht Charitra. This is a character who promises to resurrect a history that has been almost wholly divested by the end of the first film, turning the world back to its blood-soaked roots. The question at the end of the first film is how Varma might reconfigure things in the second part of his overall work—especially as Ravi becomes, by the end of the first passage, fully absorbed into the very power structure he so memorably fought against.

The second chapter does keep the promise of that epilogue alive—opening with a grand, literally explosive act of violence in a failed attempt on Ravi’s life, perpetrated by the vengeful Surya (playing a character also named Surya) who represents yet another son borne of violence—one who is unseen in the first chapter’s central events but who (as it is explained to us) is the mourning, furious offspring of the Chief Minister that Ravi murdered in the first film. Rakht Charitra 2 is a two hour film, though most of this time could possibly be accounted for in slow motion sequences that sometimes work wonderfully (as in a courtroom assassination set piece that is very well choreographed) but mostly seem to exist as a way for Varma to stretch out the final movement in the full-circle-turn that this film represents. There aren’t many new lessons to learn in Rakht Charitra 2 that we can’t see coming towards the end of the first part of the series, but what’s interesting about the second chapter is how much more of a presence Varma as a director becomes once most of the “story” has been exhausted. With nothing incredibly new to offer in terms of where the narrative is headed, (even if one doesn’t know the actual history here, it’s easy to guess what Surya does, what becomes of Ravi and how everything ends here—down to Surya assuming khadi at the end) Varma seems to concentrate on his aesthetic approach with a fury and a characteristic nuttiness that has been plaguing his movies for some time. There are moments where the results are very special—usually an action sequence, as with the aforementioned courtroom scene or another moment when Surya takes on several men in a shirtless prison knife fight that might make Cronenberg smile. But then there are ordinary, quiet moments that are so bizarrely shot and scored, that it’s clear that Varma’s poking fun at his audience and, unfortunately, undercutting the impact of what are otherwise some truly memorable performances.

And it’s not just his deliberately kooky framing or the sense that the camera is dangling at the end of a pendulum, it’s also the way he’s laid the narrative out in the second part. The first chapter of Rakht Charitra had a linear narrative that kept hurtling ahead and twisting along in its plot in a way that kept the audience on its toes. The second part—with its focus shifted away from Ravi, and onto a new “revolutionary”—has a fragmented story structure that ducks and weaves between past and present events in a way that doesn’t build up much momentum, and relies on the very gifted star at the center to be iconic enough to make up for the lack of story, while remaining a strong, sympathetic emotional anchor. Surya cuts as striking a figure as he always has, and he serves Varma’s narrative well, but what Rakht Charirta 2 asks us is to take the Surya of the first film—Ravi—and essentially shift him into the vacuum left in Bukka Reddy’s wake. This is a near impossible task for obvious reasons. There is, then, a sense that we are going through the motions here and in a watered down way, so that the only novelty is the aesthetic approach, which is the true contrast between both chapters. The two “RCs” basically tell the same story but they tell them very differently. There are two Varmas at play here—a meta-move for a film that’s all about duality in character, morality and politics. These two Varmas are not new—we’ve encountered both of them before, across the man’s rollercoaster career. The dynamic between both chapters of Rakht Charitra is not unlike the tug of war between a filmmaker who can tell a fluent, engaging story with a realist’s eye for detail and nuance, and the “bloodthirsty,” intense, wily hack who over-directs his films into the ground. There are moments in the first chapter of Rakht Charitra where he seems to come close to striking a balance, but the second film is evidence of this filmmaker’s Mr. Hyde persona taking over yet again. In absorbing the full breadth of his vision in this ambitious, flawed series, one finally gets the sense that Varma is experimenting here with what he and his audiences look for, enjoy and despise as filmgoers. How one responds to these films—to each of them— has entirely to do with what one desires and what one needs in seeing just about any movie.