This week, Joe McCulloch looks into the underbelly of Rakht Charitra while Tucker gets happily blindsided by Donnie Yen's Flash Point.
Rakht Charitra
Vol. 1 (of 2), 2010
Joe McCulloch
In 1998, Paritala Ravindra, an elected representative from Anantapur, the largest district of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, home of the prolific Telugu-language film industry -- as always, not to be confused with the Hindi-dominant, Mumbai-based ‘Bollywood’ -- produced a movie, Sri Ramulayya, on the life of his father, a Naxalite leader assassinated when Ravi was a teenager. The film concludes with high drama, as the beloved communist is shot by swarthy, sneering rivals again and again as he stands, grasps a handful of earth, envisions sunflowers and grass and delivers a defiant-sounding speech until his final breath. A giant rock is smashed over his head; his wife, Ravi’s mother, weeps. The soundtrack wails. A musical coda depicts the (early ‘80s) daylight retaliation murders of the averred assailants as the hammer & sickle is waved and rifles are tossed in military dress before a mighty red column. It’s factionism as bursting entertainment as political propaganda. Ravi himself was gunned down in 2005, having supposedly masterminded a good number of political killings after the bloody concluding events of his own movie producer debut.
Rakht Charitra is a sprawling biopic of the man, coincidentally running nearly the same five hours as Olivier Assayas’ current television miniseries project Carlos, relating to another violent man, although here split into two feature-length films (the second due for release in November). It’s also notable as the latest crime-movie project from director Ram Gopal Varma, of the seminal Hindi-language gangster drama Satya, from which Danny Boyle bit influence for his Slumdog Millionaire. I specified “crime-movie” in that Varma is a hugely prolific filmmaker in general, having directed between one and three feature films per year for the last two decades, excepting only 1994 and 2001. He’s also not adverse to chewing a bit of influence himself, having riffed on The Godfather to great success with 2005’s Sarkar, and later remade the adored ‘70s Bollywood opus Sholay to the precise 180 degree opposite of success with 2007’s Aag, to date the only Indian film deemed worthy of voting to the IMDB Bottom 100 (#13, 10/24/10, 2:42 AM EST).
This new project is purportedly based on interviews with several witnesses to the depicted events, but it remains self-evidently a variation, a work of style best represented by a rasping VO narration suggesting a long evening with a digressive elderly relative well into his cups and intent on freaking you out, you feckless little shit. Rakht Charitra is a violent movie, now so much qualitatively -- you quickly start to notice how little the copious spraying blood relates to visible bodily damage -- but in terms of volume. Everything in this movie directly feeds into a multitude of killings, ranging from a back-masked gang attack on a small apartment to a full-blown armed assault on a police station. One major character is shot down without warning in the middle of an extended scene of dialogue, while the film’s one and only musical number (a wedding celebration) snaps to a halt as soon as another target’s location is identified. There are other songs, often played loud so as to drown out tense dialogue; we can infer all we need from the characters’ expressions, and the prolific mayhem inevitably to follow. Stabbings, shootings, beheadings, dismemberment - rarely as a film so assiduously fulfilled the promise of its title, roughly translated to “a history written in blood.”
Last June, I reviewed a star-studded political thriller titled Raajneeti, which I deemed “a bunch of silly bullshit” - it’s now the fourth-highest grossing film in the history of Hindi-language cinema, unadjusted for inflation, so there goes my career in box office predictions. I stand by my assessment though, particularly its characterization as like a compressed cable miniseries, packed with glossy plots and counterplots and romantic/familial travails. Rakht Charitra is more to my liking, in that it seems utterly unmoved by any aesthetic or narrative concern beyond chasing the irate thrill of rawbone revenge. Action/crime specialist Vivek Oberoi -- whom Varma launched as a leading man with the 2002 organized crime picture Company -- plays Ravi (now “Prathap”) as at best a nominally reluctant educated youth hustled into a massively compressed timeline and howling leadership of a woodland-based gang of guns. An hour in and he’s being compared to god, and by the end of Part 1 he’s preening in immaculate white suits and a sharp politico mustache, delighting in totalitarian control over the fate of law and order.
It’s glamorous, exciting like gangs of shooters in movies can be, and pitched entirely on an oh-man-did- you-read-this-article-holy-shit level that briskly evades the comprehension of these nasty things having happened to actual people in an actually depressed, bloody area. No, it’s gore-spatter title cards and Spike Lee shots where the camera is hooked onto and facing a walking character. It’s the malevolent son of another slain Anantapur leader depicted as this first half’s main heavy, a snorting, weeping, shirtless serial rapist custom-designed to make Ravi’s violence look just a little better, who at one point is described as poisoning a snake when bitten; Chuck Norris jokes are fitting, and while the delivering character is admonished not to speak like reciting lines out of a movie, we all know better, Varma most of all. Ravi too, with his own singing, dancing communist extravaganza, and hey - one of his real-life assassination hopefuls loved the new film. It doesn’t need romance; it’s strife as romance, politics writ in pulp.
Flash Point
Donnie Yen Makes You Wait For It, 2007
Tucker Stone
It opens cold: there's just a man, he's storming into a dark boxing gym. He jumps into the ring, and through the magic of the still-shoddy English dub, shouts "Hey twinkle toes. You're under arrest. You heard me. You're busted!" As clothes are dropped to the floor, a brief battle ensues, grappling and swung fists, our hero--who we now recognize as Donnie Yen--the clear victor. The scene cuts, he's in a room, he's talking to the camera. "Have I ever busted the wrong guy? Hmmmm. That questions best left to a jury." He has one brief moment of physical activity left in these first four minutes, but after that, Donnie won't raise his fists and legs until we're seconds away from Flash Point's hour mark.
It's during that long period that most would fast forward or abandon the film entirely, and they wouldn't be entirely wrong to do so. They'll miss a few accidental moments of humor, courtesy of an overzealous set director giving our secondary leading man way too many empty beer bottles, implying that Yen's hardbody counterpart likes to while away a couple of hours solemnly drinking over fifty separate tallboys, even worse, they'll miss the car chase, thus losing the opportunity to see an elderly female passenger (the bad guy's mom, literally along for the ride) instructed to vomit in the aquarium she's clutching, which she eventually does. But let's be frank about these things: these kinds of movies, the nu-classics of the genre, they're here to serve a purpose, and that purpose is to show us the fighting.
Eventually, Yen (who doubled as fight choreographer) gets back in the game. It takes the sight of a little girl, hurled 20 feet onto concrete, to get him there. But then he does, and it's a fascinating experience that follows. It's a pointed, violent scene--there's never any question that Yen will win, the only question is if he will follow his rage to its logical conclusion. Before we see him decide, the film's music--Indian and Chinese inspired late 90's techno, omnipresent throughout--gives way to synthesized drums, and the camera pulls back, hiding us behind a fluttering plastic curtain, masking the spatter as fists rain downward. It's the middle of the day, a crowd of onlookers has grown even larger, and Yen is methodically beating a man to death.
At this point, it's obvious what has to come next--final battle stuff--but it's how Yen goes about initiating it that pushes Flash Point's late developing value higher. After the requisite "we've got to let this other bad guy go, as we have no evidence", Yen's rogue cop flips off his commanding officer and attacks his newly freed enemy in the street, thus forcing the final kingpin out of hiding. It's an excellent moment, immediate and brutal, with Yen simply picking the man up and throwing him into a steel gate before proceeding to torture him right in front of the courthouse he's just walked out of seconds before.
From there, we've come to our end, with only a brief, machine-gun/sniper rifle/Toyota ramming clear-the-decks scene in our way. Set in a field of bright green tall grass that recalls the colors of Nintendo's Duck Hunt more than it does nature, the brutality reverts to the exploding heads of a chaotic fire mission. And then, there it is. An eight minute fight scene between Donnie Yen and Collin Chou constructed out of Mixed Martial Arts/wushu/tae kwon do that Yen refers to as being "definitely, the toughest scene of my career."
That it's an incredible piece of athleticism should be apparent by description alone, but in the spirit of Christian confirmation, yes, it's very, very impressive work. Colorful, abrasive, and not without a sense of humor--the moment when the dub returns, and Yen's substitute emits a guttural "You are OVER" is eventually bested by a blinking sun, witnessing justice through the leaves--Flash Point's conclusion earns its runtime, ultimately making the argument that less can be more, if the less is compacted into one frenetic battle, waiting behind a marathon of overwrought jokes, posturing, and tight springs of violence. These are wonderful days. The grunting makes it so.
-Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, 2010
Flash Point more than delivered.
Posted by: david brothers | 2010.11.09 at 17:36