Badlapur and Sriram Raghavan: Marrying mainstream with neo-noir

(A million spoilers are peeping out from between the lines. Watch the film and come back to this if you haven’t. )

Sriram Raghavan is my favourite Indian filmmaker, which means I will be as biased in admiration of his work as can be. I thoroughly enjoyed Agent Vinod (panned by critics and viewers, I can bet my money it will attain cult status in the years to come), loved Ek Hasina Thi and consider Johnny Gaddaar to be one of the most inventive movies in Bollywood in recent times. His degree film, The Eight Column Affair, is a revealing study in abstraction and plotting, along with his hallmark dry dialogue and relentless genre-bending.

The 52 year old filmmaker, timid and lisped, however exudes a rare sort of confidence when behind the camera. His sequences are self-assured, lively and always relaying information not explicit to the uninitiated viewer. He lends a certain intelligence to his stories with some help from clever editing and complementing acting.

Take for instance how he introduces a 15 year leap in time through a subtle yet raw device in Badlapur. Laik, the chief antagonist (or is he?), has been shown to be planning to escape from prison on multiple occasions. These sequences are stitched together with simple cuts, which leads the audience to believe that the subsequent cut will move on to another such attempt at freedom. As an unestablished figure of the same height and stature as Laik is shown fleeing the confines of the jail boundaries (and failing), we begin to think that this is taking place in roughly the same timeframe as the last shot.

However, as the next shot has the camera pan slowly to his much-aged face, accompanied with a taunt spoken by a fellow inmate, we realize we have been tricked a split second before the title card appears, reading  ’15 years later.’ The director has spent the entire sequence to establish a flash-forward through the years. Compare this with how Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra ages a thieving young Milkha Singh into a muscular Farhan Akhtar (traditional fade in slow-mo with blaring music), and we begin to see greatness in Raghavan’s novelty.

Later in the film, Laik tricks his police parole officer and sneaks out of a cinema hall by sinking repeatedly into his seat, out of his pursuer’s line of sight. For the first few times, the cop gets alarmed but Laik slyly resurfaces within a few moments. Reassured by this, the pursuer loses precious few seconds when Laik actually sneaks out after sinking deep into his seat. Sririam seems to be playing a similar game with the audience in the jail-breaking sequence.

Dialogue is Sriram Raghavan’s best-behaved mistress. Non-theatrical yet not lacking in flamboyance, he writes lines which grace the situation most honestly. Take for instance a brief exchange between the eponymous protagonist and unwilling Pakistani spy-cum-femme fetale Iram Parvin Jalal in Agent Vinod. The unlikely duo share a very small interlude from all the punching and shooting in a small motel room in a far-off European nation, evading blood-thirsty terrorists as well as well-meaning authorities. As they wait for things to happen, Vinod tries to release the awkward tension between them by initiating small talk. While Iram talks of dreams of becoming a doctor, he tells the account of an incident that changed his life and made him a spy. As a schoolboy, he had been taken to a field trip to Manali, where a cableway had snapped and he had displayed exceptional bravery by holding on to the unwound cables until the authorities came in. Noticed and picked up by the Research and Analysis Wing of India for training, he says, “Aaj bhi main us cable se latak raha hun…” (Even today, I am hanging on to that cable…). Subtle, simple, believable yet powerful dialogue.

Another glowing example from the same film is when he calls up a dying Iram during the climax, directly from the cabin of a helicopter which has a timed nuclear explosive device on-board. In the heat of the moment, at a complete loss of words, he tries his best to console his moribund lover/companion with these words, “I had decided that when all this is over, I’d give you the world you’d dreamt of. All I want you to know is that…I’d decided.” In a world where a copy of The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam is used as a remote control device of a nuke bomb, he had promised Iram ‘a world where Rubaiyat is just a book of love poems and nothing more.’

Dhawan doesn't completely do justice to Raghu, but shows potential.

In Badlapur, he subverts the classic revenge tale and takes away the payoff, leaving many a cinemagoer dissatisfied with its final act. Why does Laik surrender himself to the police for a crime he did not commit? Why does Raghu keep the 2.5 Crore for himself, when his original motive was revenge? How, in one painfully awkward, stretched out scene, the antagonist confesses the crime to the protagonist, and yet there is little redemption to be found?

Raghavan achieves all this through his deliberately unconventional elemental choices: the build-up of revenge is accompanied by an overpowering background score, while the moments of expected release are brutally silent except for atmospheric sound. We see Raghu transform from a bereaved husband and father into a col-blooded killer over a period of fifteen years. Many other clever plot-points hide in plain sight, but it will take me a long time and more space to list them all. To name one such speck of intelligent design, Raghu, during the first instance of passing by a local temple, does not bow in obeisance and walks past indifferently. Later, after having committed a crime and fleeing the grasp of law, he stops by briefly and prays, perhaps, for release. He goes from being a man with nothing to lose to a purposeful plotter with money around his neck and blood on his hands. The Batman and Robin reference in relation to his son and him is another example which I am unable to resist listing here.

At a time when neo-noir is a genre almost entirely unheard of in mainstream Bollywood, Raghavan is steadily becoming its greatest Indian practitioner. To see him being backed by rich people (*cough Saif cough*) and big production houses fills my heart with hope for the future. I myself intend to join the industry in the near future, as a storyteller of Film Noir themes, which have and always will fascinate and enthral me.

Long live Cinema!