looking for jet li, or, my movie log for 2012: “agneepath”
I’m going to try and write a little bit about movies I watch in 2012. Instead of reviews, I’m going to try and remember what I was thinking while watching them. Jet Li kicking someone is always very intellectually stimulating for me.
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I went to Agneepath because all my friends had already seen Coriolanus without me, because I didn’t mind paying money to watch a movie with an Ajay-Atul soundtrack, and to be honest, because I’m tired of Rockstar having been the last Hindi film I saw in a theatre. My life in the next few months is set to be deeply uncertain and I thought, hang it, I have three hours and my friend Mithun free on a Sunday morning. If life isn’t to waste on a Hrithik Roshan film then for what is it?
Let me record my thoughts briefly and inexhaustively. Agneepath is a fresh gateway to the hell of 1992, both cinematically and otherwise. Trisha Gupta’s wonderful review here says that the film is “not just a tribute to Mukul Anand’s 1990 cult classic, but to the tradition of the Hindi film epic itself,” which is true. Unlike recent Hindi films in the “Weren’t We Cute in 1977?” mode, Agneepath is fully retrosexual. Its masculinity would make any post-1986 Amitabh Bachchan film proud, but it is neither raw nor unreconstructed. Without being ironic, it meditates on the condition of maleness produced in a decade when Amitabh Bachchan played an Afghan warlord, Sunny Deol a drunken lawyer, and Vinod Khanna several Rajputs with a family grievance.
One of the things I wondered about was whether this film misremembers the emotional violence of those old (pause, jolt, mild scream at 1990 having been two decades ago) movies. For example: Here, we are introduced to Rishi Kapoor’s character, a Dongri incarnation of evil called Rauf Lala, when he hauls a pre-pubescent girl, kicking and screaming, out of a cage, to auction her off to the highest bidder. That’s gritty filmmaking in the way Shiv Sainiks smashing up the reception at the Times of India building is trenchant media criticism. I don’t mean this degree of sexual violence is unprecedented on screen. But what made it less grating in the old films? Was it incompetence or restraint? Or was there a degree of premeditation to Rauf Lala’s introduction that was absent from the cardboard brothels of the 1980s? Nothing puts distance between 2012 and 1990 quite like the realisation that everyone, even Karan Johar, will take sex slavery — which happens twenty minutes away from anywhere in South Bombay on a traffic-free day — in much the same way they do cheese sauce on multiplex nachos.
By the way the broad-strokes Muslimness of Rishi Kapoor’s character is also a retro sort of affair. Its Otherness would be less pronounced — in as much as anything in Agneepath could be pronounced less — were it not for the very first shot in a montage of Vijay taking over Lala’s empire, in which he hugs a small girl close before letting her scamper off with the others, liberated from the room with the cage. HIDE YOUR DAUGHTERS
On the upside of this being produced in our strange new decade, the villain is no longer played by a Sikkimese actor and called “Cheena”.
Mostly as I ate my nachos I thought about the film being set in the first half of 1992, and it functioning as a comforting fictive speculation about what we were doing in Bombay in 1992. In Agneepath, set in the months well before December 6, the riots are nowhere to be seen and heard, much as they were completely unseen and unheard to me, as an eight year old living in Khar, until they actually began to happen.
As Agneepath wore on I was possessed by the thought that, in the dream-world of the film, the riots might never have happened at all, or that they might have happened elsewhere. When the land begins to burn, when fires spring up where the villain walks and gravel gets into knife wounds, it happens, not in Bombay — not in “Dongri,” represented here as little more than a multicultural, harmonious chawl compound — but in Mandwa, a small island to the west of the city, where Vijay’s father is killed, and where the final confrontation between Vijay and Kancha plays out. In Bombay — in Dongri — dons are selling young girls and negotiating turf for drug sales, which to a nachos-eating moviegoer is always something that happens to other people. No one has fled the city for good, to hide away from the police in Dubai. No one is stockpiling weapons. No one is enabling or being enabled by the chief minister. No one is afraid of saffron flags and large, aggressive religious celebrations. Was 1992 really like this? More intriguingly, what does it say about us, and our fictive imagination, that we choose to reconstruct such a 1992 in 2012?
I don’t find it offensive, although I do think that, like many films about gang wars set in Bombay there is both amnesia and pusillanimity at work in its creation and its consumption. I do find it enlightening in retrospect that we made films exactly like this, with exactly the same sense of seriousness and epic scale, all through the 1990s. How much did we have to forget to produce one poem about the Trojan War?
