It was on June 18, 2010 that I watched "Raavan" (FDFS) and penned down this before the disappointment and angst left me. In the past one year, the world hasn't changed a lot. Or has it? Mani Ratnam is again in his between-two-films hibernation, Abhi- Ash whose fortunes didn't change a bit afterwards too, tried something that they can manage to achieve. But most sadly, Passion For Cinema, where this piece was published originally disappeared without a trace (except Google's cache, from where I recovered this now)!
Back then, there were lot of opinions, for and against the film. No wonder, my entry became the most commented article of the month on PFC with 160 comments (my replies included!). It made me proud that Outlook critic Namrata Joshi and popular film blogger Moifightclub were also among the people who shared the review with their twitter followers. But the appreciation that I treasure most came from Jai Arjun Singh, a writer whom I respect a lot. He commented about my article- "a really thoughtful, well-written post... better than most of what I've seen on Passion for Cinema otherwise." Needless to mention, it made my day (for several days). Since I am not writing much these days (Sigh!) and this one no longer exists (properly) on the net, thought of reposting it...
Dear Mani Sir,
You don’t know me. It makes more sense for me to be faceless. I could be any of those Ekalavyas for whom you have been the Dronacharya for over two decades. Whose celebrations, analyses, discussions, tributes, imitations and anticipations filled the gaps in your filmography. Whenever you came from your hiatus with a new offering, we readjusted benchmarks, redefined ingenuity and found ourselves with newer worlds to dream about. I, therefore, am any one of those whose admiration, respect and awe is fully expressed in those two words: “Mani Sir”.
I still remember the evening when I caught on TV the sequence of Shah Rukh whispering to Manisha in the dark corridor of AIR Studio; interrupted by streaks of light and greetings whenever a passer-by opens the door. Never before had I experienced such a use of light and sound- or rather their absence. I couldn’t catch even a single dialogue then, but was instantly taken into the melancholic world of Amar and Meghna. It was almost a year later that I could see Dil Se, but I think that evening was when you became “Mani Sir” to me.
The long gaps between your movies didn’t really bother us. We knew you would come up with a treat we had never tasted before- effervescent romances, clever writing and pioneering technical grandeur. You rarely repeated yourself, but the underlying themes were always apparent- ordinary people caught in the midst of extraordinary circumstances, and some glimpses of contemporary society. The stories had firm roots in the soil where they unfolded- be it the rustic Tamil Nadu villages, snow clad Kashmir, Bombay suburbs or war-torn Sri Lanka.
This authenticity of geography inevitably rubbed off on the characters too- Dil Se’s Amar worked with All India Radio, Kannathil Muthamittaal’s Thiruchelvan was an engineer who wrote under the pseudonym Indira while his wife read news on TV, Alaipayuthe’s Karthik ran a software start-up while Shakti studied MBBS and had community service postings at relief camps. Underneath the technical wizard you are supposed to be, it was this firm foundation of authentic detailing, these fine nuances that defined Mani Ratnam for me. Yeah, I know you always cheated with the locations of filming- Mankulam was actually Kerala and Pondichery- but that’s fine. When it comes to on-screen realism in mainstream cinema, your films were our textbooks.
I am not sure whether you are aware of this, but we are not the same audience who saw Dil Se or Kannathil Muthamittaal. The technical marvel that used to be your forte has become so commonplace over the last decade. Directors without clear vision- both newcomers and veterans alike- have overdone jimmy jibs and akela cranes to nauseating extent. But few of them really matched you in story telling. From selection of themes to rendering of dialogues, we could look at the impressive line up of your films only with utmost respect.
Guru was the first time you failed us. For once, we felt that you were telling the story for someone else. All your trademark embellishments- camera work, editing, choreography, music- were there but they didn’t grace the corpse of a soulless screenplay. It was then we realised more than ever that your real mastery is in telling stories – everything else was secondary. We feared that you had lost that knack. We consoled ourselves with made-up excuses and waited with optimistic speculations. But Sir, three years thence, this Friday we witnessed our worst fears come true. And so I write this.
I can’t express how much I hate myself writing this. Why did you make the film Raavan, Sir? For whom? In Guru, at least your allegiance was clear. But here you have veered away from being even slightly political. I earnestly wish to know your motive. Is it just the money? Well, it’s painful if the thought of ROI- which didn’t bother you when you were fresh out of B-school- has now become your guiding force.
I feel that the central flaw in your overly hyped “magnus opus” is its lack of the characteristic Mani Ratnam roots, or I should say, any roots. Raavan might be your first film that looks like a cultured plant which has never touched soil or breathed fresh air. Strangely, this has been traditionally how mainstream Indian cinema ever was. At this point of your career, when you are officially the maverick, what was the need for this populist conformance? Why does the story happen in a Neverland and why do the characters look like cardboard cut outs? Why have the land and people been stripped off of every vestige of cultural identity? Even kids’ comics detail its settings and characters better than this. The result is the complete disconnect with any of the characters. We don’t care whether they laugh or cry, whether they live or die. Well, do you care, Sir?
Then there is this grand aura of a Ramayana adaptation. Since I think I know my Ramayana well, I can testify that you have neither adapted nor retold nor reinterpreted the epic. We all know instances in contemporary literature and cinema where all of these have been done with tremendous success. Raavan instead, ends up floating on the surface of the epic, reminding that internalising the original is the prerequisite for adaptation. Never has there been a movie where metaphors were so laboriously force fitted to the point of irritation. In order to make it explicit that Sanjeevani Kumar represented Hanuman you had to raise a portly Govinda with wires in the most awkward way ever on screen. If the character was supposed to hop around, then why Govinda? Why not someone suitably endowed, say, Rajpal Yadav? Why lift poor Priyamani by her nose to show that she is your Shoorpanakha? On hindsight, the only place where you used Ramayana as a plot device was in introducing Sita’s Agni Pariksha (polygraph test!) as a red herring to mislead the audience. But Sir, wasn’t that sequence- setting someone free to find out the whereabouts of the adversary- exactly what we saw in the first reel of your Nayakan? Forget about being characters from the epic; is there any instance where your protagonists rise above their caricature-like selves? You may fool the Generation Z and the West with that Ramayana wrapper, not us…
While I have always wished to see your screenplays published, I am sure I can never see a complete one for Raavan. Because it’s sure the first half was just blank pages. We have seen a legendary John Abraham with no written script (Amma Ariyaan) and a Priyadarshan with just impromptu scenarios (almost all of his) coming back with instant classics. I never expected to see raw footages- which even a dexterous Sreekar Prasad couldn’t connect- scattered all over a film credited to you. The entire first half is directionless. Ragini’s escape from the fall by hanging on the tree branch was supposed to gradually unfold to Beera and the audience. You did that nicely. Then what is the need of doing an action replay? Whose POV was that? Certainly not Beera’s. You seriously think Indian audience needed an explanation of that sort? Well, I can guess what happened- you shot the jump sequence (yeah, painstakingly) using cranes, wires and chroma keying (as I saw in the behind-the-scenes videos) and you just wanted to use it. Ok, fine. But why repeat it twice as if it’s Beera’s imagination?? And their walk that follows, with “Behne De” in background- could have shown the gradual development of Beera’s feelings for Ragini. Instead it’s just a collage of distorted images with a constant shocked expression in Beera’s face.
This time, I certainly won’t waste any words about how the songs were picturised. In Guru, I was disappointed because I loved the songs so much. Here the mediocre songs which come in rapid succession match well with their bad timing, hackneyed choreography and vulgarly opulent visualisation style. Both the Bachchans were irritating through out with their weird histrionics and clumsy noises. Though first I felt like blaming the cast, I realised that no actor in the world could have saved those badly written characters. I felt the same thing about Sujatha Sir’s absence also. But again, not sure whether he could have done much if your premises remained the same.
Yes, Raavan was film that shouldn’t have been made in the first place. Definitely not at this scale. The point you had to make was so small that a short film would have been ample. The film thus becomes a stunning example of how excess of finance can cause a wafer thin plot to expand to unnecessary scale and become a disaster. I don’t believe that you were unaware of it coming while making the film. But what puzzles me is why you still went ahead with it and released it under your name putting decades of your reputation at stake!
As I reach the end of this, I see that most reviews have come out and they are skewed against the film. The average film goer also expresses his discontent. The only niche that seems to be satisfied is the National Geographic watching junta for whom films are just “stunning visuals” stacked back to back. I personally feel that those very elements also had their role in marring the film’s purpose (if it had one). I just get a feeling that the story would have worked a lot better if the setting was darker and claustrophobic with may be, an introduction of Stockholm syndrome to knit up the logical holes.
Like many of us, I was also restless and depressed yesterday. The only solace I could find was in watching my favourite scenes from your old movies. Sir, we loved it a lot when you used to tell our stories- about people we know, in places we know. They thought, talked and behaved like us. Hanging from dilapidated rope bridges between cliffs or building colossal business empires are of course not objectionable plot elements. But there was once a time when we shed tears when an imbecile shot down a gangster, breathed a sigh of relief when twin boys caught in a riot were reunited with their parents and felt euphoric for a freed captive fleeing towards his distraught wife. When Amar was consumed in the flames of his passion, he wrote the manifesto of a man’s love for a woman. When Amuda tearfully kept asking her mother when she would return, her voice echoed children in troubled lands across the world. We hardly felt anything for Beera or Guru. Nor did they occupy any space outside the canvas on which they were projected.
Sir, would you be able to walk back that way- the distance from Beera to Velu Naiker, from Gurukant Desai to Anandan? Would you tell us stories the way you used to- taking us to new worlds, making us feel they are real and letting us dwell in them?
Yours faithfully,
A viewer of Raavan
- Mani Ratnam photograph by Rakesh Konni
Back then, there were lot of opinions, for and against the film. No wonder, my entry became the most commented article of the month on PFC with 160 comments (my replies included!). It made me proud that Outlook critic Namrata Joshi and popular film blogger Moifightclub were also among the people who shared the review with their twitter followers. But the appreciation that I treasure most came from Jai Arjun Singh, a writer whom I respect a lot. He commented about my article- "a really thoughtful, well-written post... better than most of what I've seen on Passion for Cinema otherwise." Needless to mention, it made my day (for several days). Since I am not writing much these days (Sigh!) and this one no longer exists (properly) on the net, thought of reposting it...
An Open Letter to Mani Ratnam
Dear Mani Sir,
You don’t know me. It makes more sense for me to be faceless. I could be any of those Ekalavyas for whom you have been the Dronacharya for over two decades. Whose celebrations, analyses, discussions, tributes, imitations and anticipations filled the gaps in your filmography. Whenever you came from your hiatus with a new offering, we readjusted benchmarks, redefined ingenuity and found ourselves with newer worlds to dream about. I, therefore, am any one of those whose admiration, respect and awe is fully expressed in those two words: “Mani Sir”.
I still remember the evening when I caught on TV the sequence of Shah Rukh whispering to Manisha in the dark corridor of AIR Studio; interrupted by streaks of light and greetings whenever a passer-by opens the door. Never before had I experienced such a use of light and sound- or rather their absence. I couldn’t catch even a single dialogue then, but was instantly taken into the melancholic world of Amar and Meghna. It was almost a year later that I could see Dil Se, but I think that evening was when you became “Mani Sir” to me.
The long gaps between your movies didn’t really bother us. We knew you would come up with a treat we had never tasted before- effervescent romances, clever writing and pioneering technical grandeur. You rarely repeated yourself, but the underlying themes were always apparent- ordinary people caught in the midst of extraordinary circumstances, and some glimpses of contemporary society. The stories had firm roots in the soil where they unfolded- be it the rustic Tamil Nadu villages, snow clad Kashmir, Bombay suburbs or war-torn Sri Lanka.
This authenticity of geography inevitably rubbed off on the characters too- Dil Se’s Amar worked with All India Radio, Kannathil Muthamittaal’s Thiruchelvan was an engineer who wrote under the pseudonym Indira while his wife read news on TV, Alaipayuthe’s Karthik ran a software start-up while Shakti studied MBBS and had community service postings at relief camps. Underneath the technical wizard you are supposed to be, it was this firm foundation of authentic detailing, these fine nuances that defined Mani Ratnam for me. Yeah, I know you always cheated with the locations of filming- Mankulam was actually Kerala and Pondichery- but that’s fine. When it comes to on-screen realism in mainstream cinema, your films were our textbooks.
I am not sure whether you are aware of this, but we are not the same audience who saw Dil Se or Kannathil Muthamittaal. The technical marvel that used to be your forte has become so commonplace over the last decade. Directors without clear vision- both newcomers and veterans alike- have overdone jimmy jibs and akela cranes to nauseating extent. But few of them really matched you in story telling. From selection of themes to rendering of dialogues, we could look at the impressive line up of your films only with utmost respect.
Guru was the first time you failed us. For once, we felt that you were telling the story for someone else. All your trademark embellishments- camera work, editing, choreography, music- were there but they didn’t grace the corpse of a soulless screenplay. It was then we realised more than ever that your real mastery is in telling stories – everything else was secondary. We feared that you had lost that knack. We consoled ourselves with made-up excuses and waited with optimistic speculations. But Sir, three years thence, this Friday we witnessed our worst fears come true. And so I write this.
I can’t express how much I hate myself writing this. Why did you make the film Raavan, Sir? For whom? In Guru, at least your allegiance was clear. But here you have veered away from being even slightly political. I earnestly wish to know your motive. Is it just the money? Well, it’s painful if the thought of ROI- which didn’t bother you when you were fresh out of B-school- has now become your guiding force.
I feel that the central flaw in your overly hyped “magnus opus” is its lack of the characteristic Mani Ratnam roots, or I should say, any roots. Raavan might be your first film that looks like a cultured plant which has never touched soil or breathed fresh air. Strangely, this has been traditionally how mainstream Indian cinema ever was. At this point of your career, when you are officially the maverick, what was the need for this populist conformance? Why does the story happen in a Neverland and why do the characters look like cardboard cut outs? Why have the land and people been stripped off of every vestige of cultural identity? Even kids’ comics detail its settings and characters better than this. The result is the complete disconnect with any of the characters. We don’t care whether they laugh or cry, whether they live or die. Well, do you care, Sir?
Then there is this grand aura of a Ramayana adaptation. Since I think I know my Ramayana well, I can testify that you have neither adapted nor retold nor reinterpreted the epic. We all know instances in contemporary literature and cinema where all of these have been done with tremendous success. Raavan instead, ends up floating on the surface of the epic, reminding that internalising the original is the prerequisite for adaptation. Never has there been a movie where metaphors were so laboriously force fitted to the point of irritation. In order to make it explicit that Sanjeevani Kumar represented Hanuman you had to raise a portly Govinda with wires in the most awkward way ever on screen. If the character was supposed to hop around, then why Govinda? Why not someone suitably endowed, say, Rajpal Yadav? Why lift poor Priyamani by her nose to show that she is your Shoorpanakha? On hindsight, the only place where you used Ramayana as a plot device was in introducing Sita’s Agni Pariksha (polygraph test!) as a red herring to mislead the audience. But Sir, wasn’t that sequence- setting someone free to find out the whereabouts of the adversary- exactly what we saw in the first reel of your Nayakan? Forget about being characters from the epic; is there any instance where your protagonists rise above their caricature-like selves? You may fool the Generation Z and the West with that Ramayana wrapper, not us…
While I have always wished to see your screenplays published, I am sure I can never see a complete one for Raavan. Because it’s sure the first half was just blank pages. We have seen a legendary John Abraham with no written script (Amma Ariyaan) and a Priyadarshan with just impromptu scenarios (almost all of his) coming back with instant classics. I never expected to see raw footages- which even a dexterous Sreekar Prasad couldn’t connect- scattered all over a film credited to you. The entire first half is directionless. Ragini’s escape from the fall by hanging on the tree branch was supposed to gradually unfold to Beera and the audience. You did that nicely. Then what is the need of doing an action replay? Whose POV was that? Certainly not Beera’s. You seriously think Indian audience needed an explanation of that sort? Well, I can guess what happened- you shot the jump sequence (yeah, painstakingly) using cranes, wires and chroma keying (as I saw in the behind-the-scenes videos) and you just wanted to use it. Ok, fine. But why repeat it twice as if it’s Beera’s imagination?? And their walk that follows, with “Behne De” in background- could have shown the gradual development of Beera’s feelings for Ragini. Instead it’s just a collage of distorted images with a constant shocked expression in Beera’s face.
This time, I certainly won’t waste any words about how the songs were picturised. In Guru, I was disappointed because I loved the songs so much. Here the mediocre songs which come in rapid succession match well with their bad timing, hackneyed choreography and vulgarly opulent visualisation style. Both the Bachchans were irritating through out with their weird histrionics and clumsy noises. Though first I felt like blaming the cast, I realised that no actor in the world could have saved those badly written characters. I felt the same thing about Sujatha Sir’s absence also. But again, not sure whether he could have done much if your premises remained the same.
Yes, Raavan was film that shouldn’t have been made in the first place. Definitely not at this scale. The point you had to make was so small that a short film would have been ample. The film thus becomes a stunning example of how excess of finance can cause a wafer thin plot to expand to unnecessary scale and become a disaster. I don’t believe that you were unaware of it coming while making the film. But what puzzles me is why you still went ahead with it and released it under your name putting decades of your reputation at stake!
As I reach the end of this, I see that most reviews have come out and they are skewed against the film. The average film goer also expresses his discontent. The only niche that seems to be satisfied is the National Geographic watching junta for whom films are just “stunning visuals” stacked back to back. I personally feel that those very elements also had their role in marring the film’s purpose (if it had one). I just get a feeling that the story would have worked a lot better if the setting was darker and claustrophobic with may be, an introduction of Stockholm syndrome to knit up the logical holes.
Like many of us, I was also restless and depressed yesterday. The only solace I could find was in watching my favourite scenes from your old movies. Sir, we loved it a lot when you used to tell our stories- about people we know, in places we know. They thought, talked and behaved like us. Hanging from dilapidated rope bridges between cliffs or building colossal business empires are of course not objectionable plot elements. But there was once a time when we shed tears when an imbecile shot down a gangster, breathed a sigh of relief when twin boys caught in a riot were reunited with their parents and felt euphoric for a freed captive fleeing towards his distraught wife. When Amar was consumed in the flames of his passion, he wrote the manifesto of a man’s love for a woman. When Amuda tearfully kept asking her mother when she would return, her voice echoed children in troubled lands across the world. We hardly felt anything for Beera or Guru. Nor did they occupy any space outside the canvas on which they were projected.
Sir, would you be able to walk back that way- the distance from Beera to Velu Naiker, from Gurukant Desai to Anandan? Would you tell us stories the way you used to- taking us to new worlds, making us feel they are real and letting us dwell in them?
Yours faithfully,
A viewer of Raavan
June 19, 2010
- Mani Ratnam photograph by Rakesh Konni
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