'Red like jungle burning bright', sang a blonde-pated David Bowie back in the 80s, as the title song for the horror classic 'Cat People'. In the present day, Anurag Kashyap unleashes a red-eyed monster for our times, straight out of a slasher gore-fest of the 80s, with a name that belonged to a real-life murder of yore. The film announces its bawdy, lurid intentions right from the rollickingly coked-up beginning- 'Raman Raghav 2.0' is not, as one would assume, based on the infamous eponymous serial killer who prowled and preyed upon the streets and its sleepers in the Technicolor Bombay of the 60s.
No, rather, this is its own beast and even as its gloriously psychopathic protagonist (or protagonists) may borrow actions and deranged decisions from the namesake, he himself is a freewheeling creature of the night, a freak of nature red in tooth and claw.
It is this bold, cocky impulse to break the mould of fact and to go beyond the genre rules that makes Kashyap's film bloody brilliant- a terse, sweltering and often sombre celebration of nihilism and a stark portrait of an urban society soaked in brutality.
It begins with a breakneck start- a cop chopping up lines of coke and then messing it all up, as it goes up his hungry nostrils. The film, shuffling between the twin character strands, gains the simmering intensity of a finely sculpted David Fincher or Michael Mann police procedural. However, 'Raman Raghav 2.0' smashes these walls and turns out to be something headier than just a line of coke.
Ramanna, a red-eyed tramp without shelter or refuge, loves to kill. That is all he knows, perhaps- though he also knows how to deliver a monologue or even cook chicken gravy. For all his blood-thirst, he is also surprisingly clumsy and yet endowed with a plucky spirit that makes him survive and even evade capture. Yet, he is himself driven towards a single goal- to meet and look up to one man who has somehow impressed his strange tastes.
That man turns out to be Raghav, a rugged cop who is doggedly handling the case even as struggling with his own inner demons. Caught in a peculiar sexual affair with a woman he picked up at a disco not so long ago, he is also an unscrupulous enforcer who would not hesitate to shed some blood to make his ends meet. Kashyap and co-writer Vasan Bala sneaks up to and sticks stealthily with these two damaged men as they inevitably come closer to each other in a perfect, homoerotic union. The director has claimed, in a flash of irony, that this might be his most romantic film. Oh, hold on. It is.
Even with the morally queasy premise that it presents, which turns darker and grimmer with each turn, this is a film which does not skimp on style. Sure, Jay Oza's textured, immersive cinematography ducks and sneaks over many a harsh urban cityscape- grimy, underlit ghettoes, shoddy residences and sordid suburban wastes- but it is also mesmeric, even elegiac in its brutality. The way he and Kashyap bring unexpected texture to the morally blank proceedings is astounding- from glistening sweat after rough, loveless sex to aeroplanes sweeping over murky tenements. Unlike the similarly nihilistic and equally powerful 'Ugly', which looked on baldly at an unfurnished world of scoundrels, this is a sexy, gorgeous film.
However, everything else is far from gorgeous. This is indeed a brutal, bloody, visceral experience and 'Raman Raghav 2.0' does not stray away from the thudding core of psychopathic rage at its core. The murders are grisly, shocking but Kashyap never overplays it- his violence is aptly unsettling but resonant and never gratuitous. There is no thrill in Ramanna's exploits- no guilty pleasure in his outraged bursts or in the sound of metal pounding human flesh. Yet, the twisted yet finely edited narrative is even more shocking in its brutal indictment of society as one rotten from the core. The dialogue- from raw rapid-fire bursts of acid and arsenic to Ramanna's revealing, intelligent ramblings on nature of life-is hard-hitting in its power while the themes it tackles with bold bravado are searing.
Kashyap has always been an ardent cinephile but while 'Raman Raghav 2.0' is mostly stripped of film-referencing indulgence, the nods that make it are pointed and sensational in their usage. We get a hint of a notoriously gruesome scene from 'Apocalypse Now', here made more startling with a pair of sunglasses and a killer one-liner. And the plot is divided neatly into chapters, much like one of Tarantino's darker films- think 'The Hateful Eight'. But in all its sprawling, sizzling flavor, it is more of a graphic novel. The best parallel for the film could be Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's seminal 'From Hell'- an incendiary, deathly dark debunking of the myths around Jack The Ripper, which also lamented the sorry state of the society at the periphery of the murderer's crimes.
For there are well-judged, pitch-perfect and darkly comic details that thicken the stew with perverse relish. The way Raghav, investigating a crime scene, picks out a plate from a kitchen, not as a clue but for something else. Or Ramanna's fascination with aeroplanes roaring in the skies. Or a domestic maid calling, unknowingly, a stash of powder as homoeopathic medicine.
Special mention should go to Amruta Subhash for playing Ramanna's helplessly bewildered sister, breaking down unforgettably at one moment with both gushing relief and crushing terror and newbie Sobhita Dhulipala playing Raghav's spirited but ultimately vulnerable bed-partner who is best when calmly staring back at Raghav, in midst of one of his violent starts.
As Raghav, Vicky Kaushal is phenomenal and creates a rippling character of sadism and battered masculinity. His rugged, drug-addled and edgy presence is raw and seductive; it is a treat to see him slink away to the corner, watching the interrogations with a defiant indifference mixed with a gaze of silent predicament. He even blazes his lines and snarls when convincingly all poised to bump someone off. A real hair-trigger performance, bravo.
And yet, this is, for all of Raghav's inner demons clawing compellingly their way through the murky gloom, this is ultimately Ramanna's tale and Nawazuddin Siddiqui's film. The actor is in his peak here- endowing his devilish character with an irresistible layer of pluck and slippery bravado that makes us guiltily root for him, even as he commits each murder with unsettling ruthlessness. There is a hypnotic glimmer in his eyes and he makes the scorching lines blaze like fireworks on the screen. His monologues are themselves searing as well as his silent, foolhardy determination to spill some more blood and Siddiqui remains morbidly unpredictable throughout the proceedings. He even grins as deviously as Norman Bates.
'Raman Raghav 2.0' reaches a feverish pitch in one terrifying, protracted sequence early on that feels like a chapter straight out of a Tarantino script. The entire set-up of Ramanna visiting his sister and her husband and child, then locking them up with himself in a prison of doom, all the while cooking chicken, is a masterstroke that needs to be seen to be believed, as Kashyap ratchets up the tension masterfully without ever letting us up and ends it, shockingly, with a cathartic outburst of violence, never shown explicitly but nevertheless shocking.
By now, both the director and the master actor are in peak form, fully confident of the punch they can bring to even the most unexpected moments. You find yourselves grinning wickedly, your head blown clean away as that haunting song 'Behooda' plays in the background- a song that echoes the film's heart of darkness.
As 'Star Wars' fans would say, you don't know the power of the dark side.
My rating- 5 Stars out of 5.
Many a rock-and-roll icon has snorted powder and swilled up acid when creating their most path-breaking work- think of The Beatles dripping acid for any one of their mid-60s seminal albums, or David Bowie being all soaked in cocaine whilst recording the iconic 'Station To Station'. Yet, while we, fervent fans, might have gladly drunk up their psychedelic visions, the artists themselves would never have really intended us to do the same crazed things.
Tommy Singh aka Gabru, a pop star from the muddy, murky land of five rivers, has no such pretensions. His songs are all about addiction and the crowds, to which he croons and raves, swallows it all- the half-crazed swagger, profanity and the relentless drug abuse- with reckless glee and devotion. And there goes an entire generation of youngsters, ready to inject acid into the withered veins of a nation that is soon falling apart.
Abhishek Chaubey's 'Udta Punjab' is the story of such a fall from grace of a land so long fabled in movies with its mustard fields and colorful charades of dance and celebration. The picture that it paints right away from the start is a hardly pretty one, but rather perceptive and probing- the focus expertly shuffling from the opening scene of a wild pop concert of ribaldry to the harsher scenes of teenagers snorting white lines and puffing grey smoke, even as the streets erupt with protest and dissent.
And that is just the beginning. This is not even wholly the tale of Tommy, even as it ends with his possible redemption. This is, plainly put, a 'Traffic'-style multiple-character drama that sets up a terrific backdrop of the rampant substance abuse in the said state and then lets its four narrative strands unravel, intersect and run parallel with ingenious, multi-layered beauty.
Chaubey, who had proved himself adept as in earthy flavor as much as in characterization and verbal fireworks, had made the rollicking 'Ishqiya' and the even better crafted 'Dedh Ishqiya' under the shadow of palpable influences- that of his erstwhile master Vishal Bhardwaj, as well as classic Western capers of the 60s. 'Udta Punjab' breaks the mould and is a beast of its own- a film which is far from being a caper about a drug delivery gone wrong.
Apart from Tommy, a half-crazed junkie musician trying to grapple with the harsh reality of crippling drug abuse around him, this is also about one-star cop Sartaj Singh trying his best, Frank Serpico-style, to escape the corruption in his unit after his younger brother overdoses after a shot of something particularly powerful.
He is aided in his single-minded quest by idealistic doctor-cum-activist Preet Sahni, a confident woman who makes him dedicated totally to curb the menace all around and investigate the tangle of conspiracy.
And somewhere, away from these narrative strands, is the stirring, poignant and often powerfully raw story of a nameless girl from Bihar falling into and rising from the muck of despair and degradation.
Chaubey takes these individual narratyives and ties them up together in a fascinatingly multi-dimensional plot (co-written by Sudip Sharma) that mashes the satirical brilliance of the Coens with the complexity of a powerful Stephen Gaghan narrative.
A lot of the talk about the film has been about the film's profane, outrageous humor and yet, it should be noted how serious 'Udta Punjab' actually is as a film. Sure, there is humor- pitch-black comedy at its blackest; there are sequences when comically absurd situations let it rip for well-earned guffaws- but most of these moments flit in conversationally, casually into a film that clearly has more in its raging, ambitious mind.
For one thing, here is a level of political and social satire that makes unforgettable digs at the reality. There are hard facts presented as intriguing clues in the central conspiracy being investigated. There are cruelly ingenious revelations that strike hard at social strife- at one scene, an imprisoned Tommy discovers that his hard-core fans have been handed the same fate for killing their parents in unblinking defiance. There is striking nuance- a seemingly normal household turns out, at one instance, an abode of hidden horrors. The film often makes our stomachs churn with the disgustingly grimy realities of the milieu but it also makes us, crucially, pay attention and even care for the fates and fortunes of the people involved.
This is a film that essentially sets out to make a strong case against the actual problem and in the way, it also makes for a particularly stunning drama of courage, bravado and despair against a seething world of evil. Above all considerations, 'Udta Punjab' is a profoundly moral film that knows what it wants to tell us.
Shahid Kapoor is phenomenally good as a loathsome, reckless Tommy Singh, bringing a ferocious wallop of freaked-out lunacy to a decadent pop star, who is, as a drugged-out character says, 'past his expiry date'. He rips through the frames in his own beastly way but it is when he pauses at the choicest moments- and particuarly in a terrific monologue with a mike- when he really rocks the show. This is Kapoor in peak form, doing devilish mischief the best way he can, without ever losing an irresistible sense of a faint heroism, worth rooting for.
As the crooked yet ultimately diligent Sartaj, Diljit Dosanjh is an absolute delight, underplaying his small-town cop part with grace and natural charisma. The way he scolds his younger brother about sitting at a cafe is as smashingly impactful as him complaining about the unchanging rates for the 'cut' from drug dealers and he even turns into the film's actual moral compass- morphing credibly from an underdog of his unit into a determined do-gooder. A scene involving him and Preeti, with him going accidentally high, is one of the finest in the film- lending a welcome streak of vulnerability to his character.
Special mention should go to two fascinating performances anchoring the main leads- veteran comedy favorite Satish Kaushik as Tommy's uncle-cum-manager, firing off bursts of abuses and demanding a 'lassi' even in a Goan beach, and Manav Vij as Sartaj's imposing, fearsome senior enforcer who demonstrates 'cop power' in ways both legitimate and evil. As Sahni, Kareena Kapoor Khan is a bit of a hit and miss- she delivers her somewhat preachy lines superbly enough but the role- essentially of a know-it-all, pitch-perfect woman in charge of turning around astray men- requires a steely confidence than the smile-happy essence that she brings.
It does not help to her character that much of the film is dominated by Alia Bhatt as the unnamed, myserious afore-mentioned Bihari migrant who lends the film its real heart. Much has been said about her accent, her physical commitment to the dire trials that her character goes through but all of it falls short. It would be suffice to say that this is her tale, the tale of a damsel in distress, of a girl trying to do things right, failing, suffering yet rising again valiantly from her seemingly endless misfortunes. It is unforgettable to see Bhatt at her finest here- plucky, world-weary, heart-broken yet fiercely determined to survival and Chaubey does her the favor of handing her some of the film's most beautifully sculpted moments, armed with Amit Trivedi's exquisuite music- her gazing wide-eyed at posters of American brands with thoughts of money in her mind, her silent yet angry submission to the terrors unleashed at her and her upsurge of rage against life's cruelties in that extraordinary monologue where she lets it rip. Take a bow, Ms. Bhatt.
'Udta Punjab' is far from an easy watch. It is not only a grim picture of a crushingly bleak reality- it is also one that tries to do more than what it can do, to tell of darker truths, to lead the film away from its faint optimism to despair that is hauntingly elegiac. Chaubey's style is no more George Roy Hill-snappy and rather Sam Peckinpah in all its darkness.
But it is nevertheless his own film, his own message, delivered with grittiness, pitch-perfect detailing (from a discus thrower delivering the goods from across the border to a billboard offering an unlikely dream of escape and hope) and excellent rapid fire dialogue. Bless the well-phrased subtitles too (getting high is referred to as 'Lucy In The Sky' at one point).
This might also be his most important film. The points it makes are a bit muddled but astute, and while the film's tone occasionally jars when shifting from one narrative to another, 'Udta Punjab' really flies when it is driven by both narrative purpose and quirk, by both brutal truth and sly irony- (its final reveal of a name might be one of its other razor-sharp digs).
Go watch it. Snort up this line of heady filmmaking and let it really blow your minds.
My Rating- 4 and a half stars out of 5.
It is a wonder how well Ryan Gosling can do comedy.
Sure, we got a taste of it in Adam McKay's scathingly hilarious 'The Big Short', where he, playing badass banker Jared Vennett, becomes the film's unlikely snake oil salesman, a smooth-tongued, edgy scoundrel who eggs the bewildered rakes around him to make millions out of the losses of people. But downright tomfoolery in a sun-and-neon lit Los Angeles of the 70s was always going to be tough for the golden-haired boy, who was last seen in the City Of Lights as the simmering, laconic getaway driver in the hypnotic 'Drive'.
In the Shane Black universe, however, anything can happen.
So, we have Gosling in his goofiest best- playing a bumbling, literally drunk on the job private eye Holland March trying to poke out ugly truths from the seedier nooks and crannies of Los Angeles. Black's gloriously unhinged crime caper lets it rip without wasting minutes- we have March pitted with downbeat off-the-law enforcer Jackson Healy, played with disarming ease by a top-form Russel Crowe, as they try to locate a missing porn actress, shortly after one, named delectably as Misty Mountains, is bumped off.
There we have it- a textbook California noir template, harnessed effectively by master filmmakers into memorable films. There are corpses, there are fast cars, meanies with guns, seductive femme fatales and the real kingpins concealed out of sight, as we follow our two less-than-ideal dogged investigators uncovering a hornet's nest of scandal and conspiracy. There is a touch of 'Chinatown' in 'The Nice Guys'- the water shortage politics of that Roman Polanski masterpiece are here recycled as an important parallel subplot of air pollution levels on the rise due to more Cadillacs on the streets (one fascinating scene has gas-masked activists playing dead) and the stoned-out tenor of the film's outrageous comedy is a blend of Paul Thomas Anderson's both 'Boogie Nights' and 'Inherent Vice'. But this film is admirably and lovably lighter than all these, crucially as it is armed with that dazzling Black element, so rare in films these days- a heady dose of bouncy spunk.
This is a film, as its title suggests, about mismatched cops, or rather wannabe cops, trying to unravel a tangled mess of murder and seedy crime and ending up like real buddies, sparking off in a chemistry that makes even the unabashed silliness all around gushingly endearing. 'The Nice Guys' might be a 70s-style noir caper and it serves up all the glossy period detail in pomp and show, sure but it is closer in vein to one of those deliriously thrilling buddy cop actioners in the 80s. It is hardly surprising since Black was the one who penned 'Lethal Weapon'; if you go on a high watching those classic Riggs-Murtaugh escapades, you qualify for this too, gladly.
There are as much spills as much thrills in the film, even as it often stays sophisticated enough by piling on enough crazily entertaining twists and turns to let us want to sneak beyond the alluringly zingy exterior of the film's milieu. Black has always offered a healthy dose of bang-up thrills but he has also stealthily, sneakily sniggered at the formula cliches and 'The Nice Guys' is no different. It has enough of an enthralling cocktail of all the elements of a typical crime caper- not to forget those charged bursts of gunplay in between- but it never ever stops having a ball of a time as well.
There are splendidly choreographed comic scenes in the film- I can't forget, for quite sometime, Gosling's March goofing up his investigator routine from time to time- (him trapped inside a toilet will send up the audiences in side-splitting chuckles)- that would feel out of place of a more serious film. Black and co-writer Anthony Bagarozzi balance the audacity of the film's excellent gags with the sharp irony of its banter. The fascinating cast of crooks and cops gets to trade excellently timed, foul-mouthed wisecracks faster than the bullets that fly around. At the same time, there is an unexpected tenderness to the proceedings, mostly because of Healy's straightup diligence to his task. It is this oddly entertaining mix of the sweet and the silly that makes even the more questionable decisions of the plot as masterstrokes of unabashed nonsense.
The cast is reliably excellent all around and special mention should go to the fabulous ladies who come in all ages. Angourie Rice, playing March's doe-eyed yet bright daughter, lends an unlikely helping hand to the private-eye misadventures of the central pair while Yaya DaCosta's deceptive Tally looks in one scene as killer as Pam Grier in one of her Blaxploitation classics. Kim Basinger has a stellar cameo as a shifty head of justice at the helm of this maze of a game and Margaret Qualley as Amelia captures all the wide-eyed bewilderment of a really rookie porn actress in a film, 'where the plot is the point'.
There is no matching the charismatic duo and both Crowe and Gosling are in terrific, swashbuckling form as they go on, hitting a dynamic that drives all great buddy movies like this. Individually, Crowe is reliably great in his world-weary, dogged essence of a doughy version of Martin Riggs with a hidden core of mushy warmth. But with no disrespect to others, this is Gosling's film, totally. He is an utter revelation as an out-of-his-league yet endlessly charming character and he makes both his calm, blazing wisecracks as well as the hilarious gags work spectacularly.
'The Nice Guys' is classic Shane Black-style entertainment served in a funky 70s glass, happily drunk on the glossy colors of the era and capturing details, both big and small with brassy style. Master lensman Philippe Rousselot captures both the sweeping Cadillac fenders as well as the long side-burns and Afros with true mastery while the Black-isms are endlessly inventive (March insists in the end that people were not hurt because they died quickly). Like last year's 'The Man From UNCLE', this is one of those saucy nostalgia trips that stays so enjoyably nutty in its own witty and whimsical way. Watch it best through 'glasses made from Coke bottles' and be ready to be rocked and rolled.
My Rating- 4 Stars Out Of 5
