Ram Gopal Varma’s Rann, which starred Amitabh Bachchanm, that was produced by Madhu Mantena-Sheetal Talwar’s Phantom Films, is a rare cinema about the collective conscience that we often like to think has gone out of style. Like Mehboob Khan’s Mother India and Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Satyakam, Rann shows how tough it is to hold your head high in dignified righteousness in a world where ethics crumble faster than cookies in a wide-open jar left out too long in the sun. Ironically, there isn’t much sunshine in Rann. The film has been shot in an anemic light, symbolizing a world that’s largely losing light.
Cleverly, Ram Gopal Varma situates his morality tale in the cut-throat world of the electronic media, where the TRP is God and deadlines the devil. And may the voice of the conscience rest in peace. Without fuss or wastage of time, Varma introduces us to the plethora of characters who colonize the bowel of a declining channel run by the idealistic Vijay Harshvardhan Malik (Amitabh Bachchan), who believes there’s room still for the straight and narrow path in a business where grabbing attention is the murder of all invention.
Varma plunges us into the world of the characters that he knows only too well. The glistening sweat on ratings-challenged eyebrows are captured through tight close-ups of worried faces that the camera (Amit Roy’s sharply cruising lenses moving from face to face with obstinate restlessness) that give nothing and yet everything away. The swirling swarm of characters reading, reporting, creating, and even manufacturing news are so normal in their workaday concerns that we almost miss the underbelly of moral anomaly that has become a way of life in present times.
As in Varma’s Sarkar, the moral battle lines in the media-run tale of Rann are drawn between the idealistic patriarch and his US-returned hyper-ventilating son Jai (Kannada star Sudeep), who is so nervous, anxious and ambitious, you know he will eventually cause trouble for his ideologue dad’s news-worthiness. Trouble arrives in the flabby form of a seedy politician, Pandey (Paresh Rawal, re-embracing villainy with lip-smacking relish), who plunges into the TRP war on television with no sense of propriety, legalese, or the law.
The plot accommodates more characters than a miniature touristic island in the holiday season (sans the sun). Not one of the characters need any explanation or occupy a superfluous place in the plot. The narrative is clenched, restless, and biting in its depiction of corruption in supposedly responsible places. The artful opposition of real and doctored news is planted into the storytelling with no triumphant flourish. Varma’s concern for the characters he puts on screen is genuine but non-judgmental. Each character, even the relatively shadowy women, emerges as casualty of an over-competitive society where morality goes out of the nearest window.
While much of the film’s inner fire burns outwards from the pithy and peppery writing (Rohit Banawlikar), the essential core of idealism is preserved in the understated relationship between the idealistic young rookie Purab Shastri (Ritesh Deshmukh, eschewing comedy to come up with restrained and pacifying performance) and his mentor Harshvardhan. Wish this bonding was built on.
As restless as his camera, Ram Gopal Varma gives no space to the complicated labyrinth of relationships to grow. We are left to gauge the depths and dimensions that underline the furious flow of empathy and antipathy between various characters by reading between the lines.
Cleverly borrowing the premise for its climax from Mehboob Khan’s Mother India, Rann moves aggressively but confidently into its passionate finale, where the patriarchal television tycoon must expose some harsh truths to cleanse his own conscience. Love for the country can never get dated when Mr Bachchan is around, even in a world as devoid of human values as shown in this film.
Rann takes us into a world where right and wrong are more financial than moral issues, where the people who make news conveniently forget that the source is often the nadir of the conscience. Rann is a razor-sharp, bitter, and biting look at the real world of rapidly-moving moral issues. Varma extracts superlative performances from the entire cast. From Ritesh Deshmukh’s heartbreaking idealism to Neetu Chandra’s part as Jai Malik’s secret Muslim love interest (the way Jai conceals her Muslim identity from family and friends is disturbing and amusing), they all know what the director and his writer have set out to do.
As expected, Amitabh Bachchan, as the conscience of the plot, presides over the speedened proceedings with a thoughtful and gentle performance. His climactic speech makes all of us sit up and think about the quality of work we do in order to keep up with the competition. Luckily, Mr Bachchan’s consistently excellent output is never dependent on the ‘competition’ around him. Ironically, his character is forced to stoop in order to conquer the TRPs. Ram Gopal Varma who has been lately guilty of making fairly compromised films, rises above the morass of mediocrity with a meteoric force, letting other filmmakers know what he is capable of achieving if he sets his heart to it.
In this exclusive, the actor recalls his run-in with Ramu’s remarkable rendezvous with reality in Rann. Amitabh Bachchan says, “ Rann was, I think, one of those films that didn’t get the recognition that it deserved. It took a bold honest look at the emerging moral guidelines of the electronic media. Ahead of its times? Yes, maybe. Though I don’t like that term. A film is as relevant as the times when it is made. What I remember was my powerful monologue on media’s conscience, or the lack of it, at the climax.”
I remind him I was on the set when the magnificent monologue was shot. Everyone was spellbound.
“Yes, I remember that,” Amitji laughs. “To play a media baron, something like Pritish Nandy, was a pleasant challenge.”
