REVIEW: Rakta Charitra-1 (2)

BLOOD LUST

In an interview about his new film Rakta Charitra, a two-part biopic of Paritala Ravindra, an Andhra rebel-turned-politician who was killed in broad daylight in 2005, Ramgopal Varma said, "Rakta Charitra is going to be the most defining film of my career not because of how well I will make it but because of the material I have in my hands. To put it simply, I don't have to work hard to make it well but I have to work hard to spoil it." And he achieves just that, ruining a potentially insightful film about recent Andhra politics and the machinations of those aspiring to grab power and those wielding it, due to excessive violence.  

You can smell a plot if you sift through the gratuitous violence -- sickles slitting throats, burning alive of people, abductions and rapes on women, heads crushed by boulders, limbs getting cut off etc. But the temptation to turn the protagonist, Pratap Ravi (Vivek Oberoi) into a 'Godfather' stereotype is too strong to resist for Varma, and the graphic demonisation of the villain Bukka Reddy (Abhimanyu Singh) equally attractive. 

Sure, the story itself has violent antecedents. Pratap's father and brother are ruthlessly killed by a politician and predictably, the system is too corrupt to prevent it. Pratap returns from Hyderabad to Ananthpur, takes refuge in the jungle and regroups in order to get his revenge. He then embarks on a spree of blood-curling murders, many of them in broad daylight, before realising that violence begets violence and decides to join a powerful actor-turned-politician (Shatrughan Sinha) to contest elections and gain respectability. 

As is usually the case, the Mahabharata is invoked to bolster the stature and righteousness of the protagonist, with lots of loud chanting in the background score and dialogues referring to the battle of Kurukshetra. But in the end, it's all just a facade for mind-numbing expressions of brutality. The many imaginative ways in which Bukka's evil is foregrounded and shot in extreme, uncomfortable close-ups, is a telling sign of the filmmaker's real motivation -- to push the limits of voyeuristic violence and test the boundaries of human cruelty.

Varma probably thought he had to do something sensational to get noticed. But you can, in moments, subvert his agenda to catch the odd undercurrent of real drama. A poor electrician whose family has fallen victim to Bukka's menace comes to Pratap to seek justice and when it's time to eliminate the villain, Pratap summons this oppressed soul and gives him his revenge. That the film even bothers to consider the suffering of the marginalised (if only in its own disturbing way), is its only real achievement.

Comments

[Rakta Chaitra 2 Review]

I really loved part one and waiting for part 2.

R.G.V Rocks.

4 star from my side.