Raavanan: Vikram’s tribute to Mifune?

 
Manirathinam attempts a Kurosawa with his bilingual flick ‘Raavanan’ and just like Kurosowa’s Man Friday Toshiro Mifune, he has got Vikram to bring in the less explored, human wild side into reel life. The Tamil version ‘Raavanan’ got at least some attention from the critics and the cine goers where as the Hindi version ‘Ravan’ was rejected equally by all fronts. I thought watching the Tamil version will be the right thing to do as the director himself had expressed his regret for making the Hindi version.

[Toshirō Mifune as bandit Tajōmaru in Rashomon (1950)]

Let’s talk about the theme of the movie. It’s a bold attempt to revisit the epic Ramayana with a different perspective and in modern settings. That means, bringing out the Rama out of wrongly projected Ravana and Ravana from the shell of much hyped out Rama where Rama and Ravana represent the good and evil in that order to the Indian consciousness. The Story shows how a bandit/Tribal Leader who has both his evil and good side in him, kidnaps the pretty wife of a Police Superintend as he seeks revenge for his wronged sister in the hands of police, and how she gets rescued in the end. The movie spends most of its time in showing the good side of bad guy and the bad side of good guy and has got this anticlimax where the wrong villain being killed by the wrong hero.

[M.T.Vasudevan Nair.]

The idea of altering and retelling a commonly accepted myth is not a fresh idea even in Indian cinema, as I can recollect how convincingly the Malayalam writer and Jnanpith award winner MT Vasudevan Nayar re-told one of the famous ballads in Kerala with reversal of roles, ‘Oru Vadakkan Veeragadha’ which brought laurels to Actor Mammootty and director Hariharan.

Kerala had an ancient tradition of settling out the disputes of the riches and the royals with a staged combat between two traditional martial art (kalaripayattu) experts with deadly weapons, the culmination of which will be death of one warrior. The ballad was about two such legendary warriors, Aaromal the hero and Chanthu the Cheat.

[Mammooty as Chanthu the traitor from the movie, Oru Vadakkan Veeragatha. he bagged national award for his performance.]

With his much successful and one of the best movie scripts ever written in Malayalam, MT Vasudevan Nayar transposed the Cheat into a hero and the hero into a coward. As this script what MT wrote was amazingly original which baffled millions of keralites when he successfully reversed the roles of most famous villain and hero of our ancient history, Mani Rathinam cannot say his was Original.

There are plenty of literature works in India, already attempted it and there was always a minority in India who believed in the goodness of Ravana and evil coward side of Rama and the Epic Ramayana itself suggested this fact, clearly visible to its non-religious admirers. BR Ambedkar in his book about Rama quotes from Ramayayana itself to list out all evil things committed by Rama and questions the logic in worshiping him. The Ancient Tamil Version of Ramayana, Kamba Ramayana suggests that Ravana was a teetotaller and man of heroic qualities and Sita actually admired Ravana.
Let’s come to the ‘Movie’ side of the Movie Raavanan. The Script itself is not good enough for a movie of this class intention. Manirathinam movies always suffered such silly but cancerous hyper melodrama which would remind you of some school dramas. Let’s look into some examples from some of his movies.

(a) Protagonist of the movie ’Roja’ shows his patriotism in rolling over a burning Indian flag to save it from flames.
(b) Hero of ‘Dil se’ hugs a woman suicide bomber with whom he is in love with, to let the bomb explode killing themselves, with a noble intention of saving hundreds of people.
(c) ‘Bombay’ with such loud straight out of comic strip characters of religious fanaticism.
(d) ‘Yuva’ with impossible and unrealistic dreams of the success of a young political party(Whole style of the movie was seriously inspired by Kurosowa classic Roshomon)

Raavanan has the following characters directly related to the epic Ramayana.
(1) Rama, ‘Dev Prakash’ Played by Pritviraj.
(2) Ravana, ‘Veeraiya’ played by Vikram
(3) Sita, ‘Raagini’ , Aishwarya Rai Bachan
(4) Hanuman, ‘Gnanaprakasham’ , Karthik
(5) Vibishana, ‘Sakkarai’ , Munna
(6) Supranaka, 'Vennila', Priyamani

[Abhishek Bachan as Ravan in Hindi and Vikram in the Tamil Version]

Apart from the characters which can be mapped directly, there are numerous wanted or unwanted characters like, ‘Singarasu’ the elder brother of ‘Veeraiah’ (Possible match from the epic is 'Kumbakarna', younger brother of Ravana)  ,as usual mishandled by Prabhu. Prabhu has got the miserable magic of turning any serious character into a mere clown as he did in ‘Kalapani’ and numerous other movies. Priyamani who played the sister of ‘Veeraiya’ was perfect though her role was short. She doubtlessly outclassed Aishwarya Rai, who has got the burden of her beauty and has not improved as an actress ever since she appeared in manirathinam’s Iruvar. (Iruvar, no doubt; is the best movie he ever made) where she performed much better.
Manirathinam’s unquenchable penchant for hyper melodramatic climax killed the quality of the movie, which also exposed the serious gaps in the script. For example, when the SP dev and his special task force enters the wild forest in hunt for Veeraiya, they are spotted early, distracted or caught by Veeraiya’s men but, in the climax, Dev marches with his well armed battalion straight up to Veeraiya without any obstacle. Script questions the intelligent quotient of the movie goers by making Karthik’s ‘Ghanaprakasam’ to do monkey styled acrobats on trees to show that he plays Hanuman, the monkey god who was Lord Rama’s original messenger on his Project Ravana. There are miserable scenes like the one where the modern monkey god tells to Raagini (Sita) that he had brought a sign from Dev(Ram) as he spots her in the forest.
So what are those things which make you watch this whole movie with that school boy’s script and a former Miss world’s useless charm? One of the ingredients which would make you to cling on to your seat must be the cinematography by Manikantan and Santhosh Sivan in the beautiful locales of Karnataka and Kerala forests.

Remember that beautiful areal view of the boat-crash-kidnap scene in the beginning and also the Ravanan’s big dive from the cliff. Vikram almost did a Toshiro Mifune (though subtlety and originality of the latter was impossible to reach at, )with those wild grins and grunts. This is the best performance of him as an actor so far. Raagini’s attempts to escape from the captivity and the scenes of her physical duals with the strong macho antagonist, before she falls prey to the so called Stockholm syndrome (“a paradoxical psychological phenomenon wherein hostages express adulation and have positive feelings towards their captors that appear irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, essentially mistaking a lack of abuse from their captors as an act of kindness” )are very much reminded of, or possibly inspired by the academy award winning Ang Lee movie ‘The Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon’ keeping in mind that, comparing the great performance of Zhang Zhui and Chang Chen in such scenes with the mediocre show of Aishwarya Rai and Vikram will be a crime to commit. Performance of Prithvi Raj who played Dev can be considered just adequate but nothing more to talk about where as Karthik's hanuman was a better show. Music and score was good and in tune to the story line.

(Zhang Zhui and Chang Chen from the movie Crouching Tiger hidden Dragon.)

To summarize, Raavanan is worthy of watching one time, to enjoy the photography and Vikram’s well executed grunts inspired by the world cinema.