A dark bromance. Review on Raman Raghav 2.0

After having flatly refused to be an accomplice in the watching of Conjuring 2, I was wondering how to walk out of Raman Raghav in the interval.

I am the biggest fan of Kashyap that I know, but the movie was so dark it was making me almost sick. People are actually scary instead of imaginary ghosts. I think Kashyap makes a compelling case for the horror genre of real people in this film. However, the moment passed and I am glad I watched this gem from the best director today in Bollywoood.

I have never found any protagonists/heroes in his films. All characters are grey. UGLY made this especially clear. Raman Raghav goes a step further and demolishes all distinctions between protagonist and antagonist.

The track “Tu sacha behuda”(You’re the genuine Ugly) pertains to the character played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui, loosely based on the stoneman, a real-life serial murderer from Bombay.(Nawazuddin makes everything work, always.)

A character who converses with “God” and carries out such brutal violence is never given a justification for his psyche. In fact the murderer claims that the blood-lust that drives him is of the exact same nature that drives religious maniacs and people who go to war. They hide behind these excuses for violence while he does it without giving himself an excuse. At one point he says all those people from various parts of the world who converge in Syria are people who wish to fan their animality.(Apne andar ke jaanwar ko hawa de rahe hain).

While the psychobabble of character justifications is thankfully absent, the film squarely indicts society as a whole for its love of violence. From slap-happy authoritative parents, to women who love being treated abusively. I read somewhere that the Greeks had a God of Bloodlust. Just like Indians have a god of lust(Kamadeva). Ares, the god of war and bloodlust, I later discovered on google. No wonder humans are so strange I reflected.  Lust is demonised, war is glorified in all “civilisations”.  When the music gets all clubby and Tarantino-esque at the beginning of a violent scene, I felt like the audience was almost being ridiculed for its own love of violence.

Only a genius like Kashyap knows what it takes to get such a tale on celluloid. The character actors are the backbone of all his films and the same is true here.

Later in the second half of the film, the female lead opposite Vicky Kaushal is crying over him and there is some classical song in the background going “Aaaa”. Me: I cannot feel any empathy for this creature. Husband( fan of both kashyap and Ram Sampath): so no one is asking you to feel empathy for her. Me: This  gaana is asking me to feel something.:/

Desensitised or not, the film left me in further awe of the ability of Anuraag Kashyap to shine a torch on the crevices of reality that we would much rather deny and suffer the consequences of such denial. Oh, and not to forget that the climax is totally unexpected and will leave you agape. Brilliant storytelling.