Rewind to the 90s, please, RGV

It is said, and I suppose with some justification, that the greatest regret people have before they die is the time they believe they have wasted, fighting and obsessing over things that don’t matter. I don’t know when I am going to make the journey to the great unknown. However I am quite sure that I will rue the moments I have washed down the gutter, watching Ram Gopal Varma’s recent films.

Take for example, Department, a collage of the most hoary mafia vs cops clichés ever assembled. It has absolutely nothing to redeem itself, except perhaps Dipak Tijori’s lustily verdant moustache. Yes, I realise the camera movement is supposed to be visionary. But the philistine in me just did not get the aesthetic value of the visual equivalent of affixing a camera to the back of a fly and letting it buzz about. Shots from the bottom of trousers, from the striker perspective on a carrom board. What next? Pan out from a dead man’s nostril? How about a bit of story? How about some half-decent acting? Or is Ram Gopal Varma just too cool for all this?

One can ask, with the shocking downward spiral of Ram Gopal Varma’s films over the last few years, why do I keep watching? The reason is simple. Hope.

In the late ’80s and ’90s, RGV defined an almost alternate grammar for mainstream Bollywood. His movies were not about “rock dancers”, or about gaajar ka halwa and baingan ka bharta eating Mamma’s-good-boys. There was no sanctimonious moralising, no attempt to spray-paint halos around heroic heads. In Satya, the protagonist takes to a life of crime not because he had ‘Mera baap chor hai’ tattoeed on his forearm. He does so because that’s just the way he is. Violence was never cartoonishly exaggerated in the standard dhishoom-dhashoom way, but lurid in its gratuitousness, and almost always shockingly impactful. Even when RGV went mainstream masala, like in Rangeela, he was a trendsetter, whether it be in the choreography or in the camerawork. Even his commercial mis-steps, like Daud and Kaun, were worth appreciating, if for nothing else but the fact that they were still radically different from that which was playing on other screens.

However, the number and frequency of blanks from the RGV gun kept increasing as we went into the 2000s. Company was, to an extent, entertaining. But really nothing else. Every RGV flick now looked exactly like the other ­— the ugly men in dark rooms with over-exaggerated facial contrortions, the “Vora nahin Woraaaa” type of inane dialoguebaazi, and then, of course, the derivative plots. It was as if RGV had become so straitjacketed by his increasingly self-perceived aura that he felt compelled to showcase his technique in every frame, like a hammer beating away at an anvil, at the cost of almost everything else.

And then finally there was Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag, his cinematic Waterloo where RGV took his directorial sword and scythed off, in Gabbarian style, the two arms of Sholay (its script and its characterisation) leaving behind a stump of a movie that was a bastardisation of everything the original classic epitomised. But then again, as a one-time fan, I kept watching, keeping the faith. Through Nisabdh, which was a bit like wandering through the meat aisle at a grocery supermarket. Through the Predator-knock-off that was Agyaat, despite its main laugh-out-loud moments (which I presume was not what the director intended). Through Rann. And now through Department.

All for the sake of hope. The hope that RGV, the man we idolised in the ’90s, will finally get his groove back.

Arnab Ray is the author of The Mine and May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss.