After what's been an epically long fallow period, Hindi cinema has another blockbuster on its hands. The question is why a regressive clodhopper like Laxman Utekar's Chhaava should have succeeded where other recent exercises in nationalist rabble-rousing have sunk without trace. Maybe it's the scale of the thing. The legend of 17th century warrior Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj (Vicky Kaushal) - the William Wallace of the Marathas, standing up for self-rule against the tyrannies of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (Akshaye Khanna, lifeless under old-man latex) - has here been reimagined along the lines of those overstretched, over-populated roadshow releases by which Hollywood tried to tempt couch potatoes back into cinemas in the 1950s and 60s. Hundreds, if not thousands of extras flood the screen, in set-ups big enough that the uncritical viewer might be persuaded to overlook their essential vacuity. Maybe it's the names attached, and the volume they've been encouraged to work at. The honourable AR Rahman has contributed songs in much the same feverish key as Ponniyin Selvan's "Chola Chola", echoing action that forsakes strategy and intrigue for men hollering battle cries and charging full pelt at one another. Even before this past weekend's endorsement from PM Modi, Chhaava made itself unignorable at what's been a quiet time for Indian cinema - but to achieve that, Utekar had no need for finesse, subtlety or artistry. Where you sense Mani Ratnam and Sanjay Leela Bhansali keep a small legion of tailors, seamstresses and other craftspeople just off-camera to finetune and tighten up their historical visions, Chhaava has roughly two thousand crates of Monster energy drink. The film that results is pumped and psyched, ever-ready to rumble, but also empty calories, fatally lacking in even a shred of personality.
It's also not terribly well adapted. The source is Shivaji Sawant's novel of the same name; as with its producers Maddock Films' recent Sky Force, scenes are insistently datestamped to authenticate their basis in some idea of historical reality. Yet the five-man story team (including Utekar) haven't found the dramatic component that would make this action come alive; everything remains set in stone, predestined. Chhaava has two types of scenes - elaborately dressed meetings, and the thumping fights that got everybody out of bed in the morning - and it's a moot point as to which is the duller over the long haul. Once you've seen one set of angry, hairy men running pikes and swords through another, you have kind of seen them all; desperate to find some variation going into the film's third hour, Utekar turns the lights off during one battle, completing the film's retreat into the Dark Ages. The bigger creative failure here, though, is that of those hypercushioned sitdowns, which never adequately account for why everybody on screen is so huffy all of the time. These back-and-forths nail down the historical lingo, sure - absolutely nobody on screen talks like a regular human being - but without Bhansali's modernising instincts, his ability to spot something of today in the past, the default position of this screenplay is that this is just how people were in olden times. How else was man supposed to measure out his afternoons in the days before Wordle, if not by endlessly shouting in their fellow man's faces and trying to pop their heads off with a shield? As a consequence, Chhaava quickly begins to resemble some lumpen soap opera driven by factionalism and bloodlust. With nothing so elaborate as plot twists on offer, we're instead subjected to one atrocity after another: rivers of blood, a tree of hanged men, shadowplay rape, and a final descent into drawn-out Gibsonian torture, just to rub salt into everybody's wounds.
Kaushal has proven a subtle actor in the past, but here he's playing a hero the film demands we worship, so that subtlety becomes surplus to requirements. Instead, he too shouts a lot, partly so as to get this flat dialogue through a full beard, layers of ceremonial dress and the mud that cakes his features during his damper dust-ups. We know the drill: these are the bellows that are meant to ring through eternity, the Marathi equivalent of Braveheart's freedom cries. But he doesn't half come over as one of those men who shouts - constantly, aggressively - to try and conceal the fact he has nothing very much to say for himself. He may still come off better than Rashmika Mandanna as our hero's sweetheart Yesubai, who at one point murmurs something about wishing she could have our boy in her womb so that she can give birth to him as her own child. In any other context, such an admission might be looked on askance as deeply weird; here, it's just by-the-by, something we're asked to take at face value, the kind of potent emotion strongmen provoke in their womenfolk. With roughly half the remaining dialogue consisting of lusty chants of "Jai Bhavani!", one gets a sense that Chhaava owes its success to being a meathead alternative to the season's nuanced awards bait. Here is a multiplex option that promises no subtext, no ambiguity, no need to engage the brain whatsoever, that delivers nothing but WAR being waged by MEN OF WAR, the kind of basic-bitchery that can become diverting, even entertaining enough under the direction of folks with a sense of humour. But Chhaava betrays no sense of humour - indeed, were you inclined to interrogate it unduly, you'd conclude it regards humour as a weakness. That doesn't stop it from being deeply, Pythonesquely silly in places: the pomposity it lapses into is exactly that of an industry that doesn't have cautionary memories of a Life of Brian or Holy Grail burned into the back of its brain. Mostly, it's so concerned with putting on an imposing show of force that it forgets to be involving or interesting, and becomes deadening where it means to be stirring or affecting. Wise man say: a movie cannot endure on testosterone alone.
Chhaava is now playing in selected cinemas.
No comments:
Post a Comment