Whassup with Ramu?

Why has one of our most gifted film directors sunk to such depths?

The world in Rann is on the verge of a spectacular apocalypse, and everybody in the newsroom looks suitably screwed. It is the sort of place where a malfunctioning coffee machine sparks off discussions on the state of the nation. This newsroom is what happens when everyone is from JNU.

As Rann ends, you begin to understand what real gangsters felt like when Bollywood caricatured them in the 80s. Some even complained to the media. Rann gives the media an excuse to complain to themselves. Television newsrooms, contrary to Varma’s understanding, aren’t necessarily a hotbed of misery and intrigue.

Rann is a departure for Varma, but it shares the same weaknesses of his recent movies: the obvious criminal politician/godman, the innocent who games the system, the heavy-handed direction, the amateurish background score. Is this—the mix of dirty power play, rock music, and female decoration—the ideal cinema he once promised us? Has Varma now become Sanjay Gupta without the DVD collection?

Rann seemed the most promising of all his recent movies. It promised to touch upon the crucial and uneasy relationship between media, business, and politics, and the effect these concerns had on reporters. These are things newsmen wonder about often, and perhaps Varma had finally found a story rich with possibility. He had been unusually quiet about it, a far cry from the time he wanted a movie out every weekend. But the abstinence clearly signified nothing.

Varma should have stuck to crime. Since Ab Tak Chappan, which he produced, people who had worked with Varma had occasionally mentioned little things about him that made you wonder. He grew too sure of himself, one filmmaker said. “He stopped learning.” A writer who wrote a famous gangster flick for Varma grew disillusioned with his closed mind. Another writer said Varma had stopped making films. “Ramu makes something else now.”

Rann is an unhappy film. No one smiles, not even wistfully. For the full length of the film we are told that television news is soulless, ethically challenged, and appeals to the lowest denominator. You could say that about cricket commentary, newspapers, big business, and just about any other money-making enterprise in India. Madhur Bhandarkar once said that his film Fashion was for the poor man in small-town India who didn’t know about the industry. Rann feels like that kind of film.

What makes Rann doubly distressing is that Varma has settled on a method of storytelling that is without nuance. Mournful background music drowns out any opportunity to think. Sarkar had the annoying ‘Go-vin-da-Go-vin-da-Go-vin-da’ chant. The chants in Rann are more varied and grating: “Gali gali mein shor hai, saare neta chor hain”, and “Zameen jo na beche, khud wohi bik jaate hain”. A dramatic monologue by Mohnish Behl, the sleazy head of a television channel, about how much a politician can make as Prime Minister, precedes a cynical riff: “Mera Bharat mahan, mera Bharat mahan”. It feels like Varma has simply forgotten how to make a film.

Characters come with directions included. Hence Paresh Rawal is given the full corrupt politician treatment, with a large red smear of paste on his forehead, sunglasses that don’t come off, and an evil laugh. Rajat Kapoor plays a corrupt businessman, and so he smirks a lot. Because Amitabh Bachchan is honest, he wears a bewildered look. Bachchan’s son is weak, and he looks troubled and smokes a lot. Since Riteish Deshmukh is an earnest and idealistic reporter, he wanders around with the appearance of a man who has just encountered Sony’s after-sales service.

Every one of them, apart from Deshmukh, rings untrue. They behave improbably for men who hold the positions they do. When Rawal, the front-runner for the Prime Minister’s job, tells a large crowd that India doesn’t need him, he needs India, Kapoor, facing the crowds a few seats away, is barely able to stop smirking. This is either inept storytelling, or Kapoor has to be the world’s worst corrupt businessman.

Varma also seems to be in love with dialoguebaazi like never before. Not just dialogues, but entire speeches. Monologues. He is thoroughly democratic this way. Deshmukh gets to deliver a lecture on the role of news channels and truth in everyday society. Behl does one on how corrupt people make money and why Deshmukh should stop being an idealistic idiot. Bachchan delivers a few. Never mind that the film takes one heck of a detour to let him have a random Hindu-Muslim speech that convinces his wife to immediately accept her son’s Muslim girlfriend. The speech he gets at the end is so long it makes Ayn Rand look like Ernest Hemingway.

Bachchan’s Vijay Harshvardhan is honest, but Varma takes it for granted that honesty is the same as naivete. As the head of the channel, he is desperate to believe that his channel can gain TRPs and advertisers without compromising his ethics. In one instance he ponders over a CD that contains damning and unverifiable information that could sink Rawal’s rival, and quite correctly asks his son where the CD came from. Feigning exasperation, the son says, “You don’t look for proof! You just report the truth you get!” Harshvardhan is convinced. He broadcasts the CD immediately.

What else is there? The channel’s chief operating officer, Suchitra Krishnamoorthi, plays a double agent. She reports the company’s plans to Behl. The first time she does this, Behl signs her a cheque. They do this in a bar. A bar. Talk about realism. This is exactly where high-profile journalists have clandestine meetings. And when bars are full, they go to nightclubs instead.

At the end of it all, Varma’s movie is a fake call to arms: it expresses surprise, but the surprise looks put on. Sure, there’s a story here, of the gradual decline of a TV channel, how an honest reporter stands up for it, and the battle between good and evil. But it all gets muddled.

Of course, the absence of subtlety hasn’t stopped Bhandarkar’s march towards success, and there’s no reason why it should stop Varma. But the point is, this isn’t the Varma you remember, if your memory is long. This isn’t the guy who made Rangeela, Company, and Satya. This is Varma’s evil twin, a guy who likes drunk camerawork and lingers a little too long on Neetu Chandra’s cleavage. This is a director who believes he’s depicting this world, but doesn’t quite realise how out of touch he really is.

About The Author

Rahul Bhatia