The Dev Patel loosed onto the streets of India in this week's Monkey Man is all but unrecognisable from the Dev Patel who appeared in Slumdog Millionaire fifteen years ago. Gone is the nervy Skins graduate, visibly wondering what on earth he's doing at the centre of a big (indeed, Oscar-winning) studio movie overseen by a name director. In his place: a newly confident writer-director-star - a multiple threat, in multiple respects - who proceeds to kick serious ass in a movie with the brass balls to riff on the John Wick series and the Ramayana simultaneously. More than that, this Patel is revealed as a creative touting a vision of India that ventures some measure beyond the tonally erratic, ultimately nice-making Slumdog. Patel's fighter-hero Kid - the name knowingly ironic, given the bearded warrior we observe taking names and breaking necks - passes through what appears from the off to be a failed or failing state, with a toplayer of elites in skyscrapers and helicopters floating over a people encouraged to fight among themselves, a political godhead scattering pious truisms in his wake, and everything else falling into grime and general decay. (One especially forlorn-looking TV, seen in the opening ten minutes, seems to have forgotten what better days ever looked like - no surprise, given the toxic news it's obliged to belch out on a 24-hour basis.) It looks infernal even before Patel invokes Apocalypse Now with an overhead shot of Kid as seen through the blades of a ceiling fan; it's going to require more than air con to clear the fug, we sense. Even with the flags in the film's political rallies reportedly toned down from BJP-hued saffron to a barely more soothing red, you can see why Monkey Man's Indian release is now in doubt this election year. Here is a movie to give the Indian Board of Censors severe pause, if not outright palpitations.
The light guiding us through this murk is Patel's confidence - there not just in the way he now holds the screen, but in how he and co-writers Paul Angunawela and John Collee structure their material. For all their byzantine worldbuilding and baroque art design, the Wick movies were inherently simple things, founded on the tale of a dude exacting vengeance on those ne'er-do-wells who did for a beloved puppy. With Monkey Man, Patel plunges us into a layered quagmire, leaving us to figure out for ourselves why Kid, a backstreet wrestler by trade, is so determined to inveigle himself into the life of society madam Queenie (Ashwini Kalsekar). There's a clue of sorts in the title, and the monkey mask Kid wears while beating down his foes inside the ring: in the Ramayana, Hanuman was the simian-coded mortal punished by the gods for climbing beyond his station. Yet as our boy begins scrabbling up this treacherously slippery, ever more tenuous social ladder, his ascent also seems to mirror Patel's own scrappy progress towards the A-list, from rabbit caught in the headlights to someone who genuinely (and rightly) believes there is a place for him on the big screen. (As with the Kid's endeavours, it is a process; it involves patient watching and learning, and knowing when to make the odd big swing count.) What's new and distinguishing is Kid's trauma. He fights not like some well-honed automaton - Patel is too toothbrush-skinny and upright for that, and the Kid can't afford whey powder or weights - but as if he were a wounded animal: reluctantly, desperately, with whatever comes to hand and painfully intimate knowledge of how his kind have traditionally been treated by the powers-that-be. Like I say, if you're waiting to see Monkey Man in India, you may have to wait some time - its sense of injustice and its rage at that injustice are too deeply baked in for a few minor flag adjustments and any cuts to make much difference.
The risk is over-emphasis, that Patel might push this vision too hard. Every now and again, you wince at something that lands too squarely on the nose: when the Kid is told not to feed a stray dog on the grounds "it gives them hope", or when a working girl Kid crosses paths with (Sobhita Dhulipala, a major Indian star slightly buried amid the credits) is introduced to a tranced-out cover of The Police's "Roxanne". (In both cases, we get it.) Several POV sequences suggest the terrifying-to-malign influence of Gaspar Noé, which cannot be the case, as Patel is still only about twelve or something. Yet these more thumpingly obvious beats have to be weighed against Monkey Man's many deft, precise, even forcefully witty touches, which would indicate Patel is as much the entertainer as he is the politically motivated artist or action hero, that he's watched as much Jackie Chan as he has Anand Patwardhan. The kind of bathroom fight that is now de rigueur in these big-budget action endeavours (cf. Mission: Impossible whatever it was) is here nimbly reordered just by following the lines of a gun being booted around over the initially pristine, increasingly bloody white tiles. Another action-movie cliché (the bit where the hero takes a long run-up to throw himself through a window) is flipped on its head in a way Chuck Jones would surely have applauded. And the feminised weapon of choice Kid clings to in his final battle has enormous symbolic value, bigger than all the penis-cars in the Fast & Furious movies piled atop one another. Before that, however, there is a midfilm retreat to a temple staffed by an outcast collective (including several trans and third-gender performers), where the suddenly rocky Kid heals and regains his feet. Here is solidarity, storytelling, laughter, nature and music. (And another cliché repurposed: the hero starts to time his punches to a tabla drum's beat, giving Kathak dancing an extra whack.) Without this interlude, the film might just have seemed an especially dynamic action knock-off. With it, it gains considerably, setting its hellish vision of what India's become against a heavenly counterview of what it still could be. So if Patel the performer kicks ass here, that's as nothing compared to the achievements of Patel the writer-director. Pulled off with astonishing assurance and enormous style, Monkey Man is that rare studio movie that gets richer and weirder, more engrossing and propulsive as it goes along - and which doesn't have a single uninteresting shot in its whole two hours.
Monkey Man opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.
No comments:
Post a Comment