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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Road to redemption
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Road to redemption

Road to redemption

Factory-made: A still from Department Premium

Factory-made: A still from Department

There used to be a time when the release of a Ram Gopal Varma movie was a minor event. That time has unfortunately passed. After the acclaim rightfully accorded to Satya in 1998, he needed no more than a single-word title—Kaun, Company, Mast, Sarkar—to generate anticipation. Varma’s latest terse-sounding movie, Department, opens on 18 May. It’s about power and pelf in the Mumbai police force.

Factory-made: A still from Department

If you met Varma before Department’s release, chances are you would be sold. The best part about interviewing Varma begins after the dictaphone has been switched off. Varma is a great raconteur and a sharp judge of the movies. He wittily skewers the current cinema, but is also disarmingly self-deprecating. If the very mention of his name is accompanied by a rolling of the eyes, he knows it—and he will make a dig about it. Don’t be surprised if a movie called “RGV" shows up on his list of future projects.

Varma’s world view is equally cynical. However, he has been unable of late to translate his insights into images or dialogue. The director’s obvious intelligence can’t prevent bad judgement or alter compulsive film-making habits, such as the use of a background score that can be heard as far away as Pluto, the tilted-angle shots taken through the legs of a man or from below a chair, or the repeated use of narratives that are past their expiry date.

Varma’s Factory Productions threatened at one point to challenge the way Bollywood made movies. The Factory—a Varma joke about the industrial nature of the movie business—was supposed to be a crucible in which new talent would be forged. It did too, briefly—directors like Anurag Kashyap, Sriram Raghavan and Shimit Amin owe their early breaks to Varma’s munificence. But in a self-fulfilling prophecy, the Factory became an assembly line for copycat goods. Varma’s reply to the failure of the Factory was to return to the director’s chair and roll out films that can only be described as mysteries. Why were films like Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag, James, the remake of Shiva and Darling made at all? Why would a director set out to systematically destroy his good name? Yet there is no stopping the man. Varma has doughtily survived the tsunami of bad reviews that have come his way of late. A compulsive and almost touching love for the movies propels him towards expanding his filmography in Telugu and Hindi. He continues to find backers, actors and technicians, perhaps all as compulsive as him, to sign up. Perhaps they too believe, like some critics, that despite his past transgressions, the film-maker who gave us Rangeela, Satya and Company isn’t quite finished yet. Could Department be that return to form? Life is never short of surprises.

Department releases on 18 May.

Nandini Ramnath is the film critic of Time Out Mumbai (www.timeoutmumbai.net).

Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

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Published: 11 May 2012, 08:05 PM IST
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