There are so many stories related to the making of Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya, it is hard to tell the trees from the wood, so to speak. The film has been mythologised beyond a reasonable pout. And I do mean pout, what with the film’s leading lady doing a facsimile of an authentic Mumbai working girl.
Urmila Matondkar plays a struggling singer who sings in Lataji’s voice, and gets propositioned by a music director(the late Neeraj Vora) who tells her, ‘Talent is okay, but what else do you have to offer?’
One could ask Ram Gopal Varma the same question. He brings together a gallery of outstanding actors in Satya. But most of the players are swamped by sinking sense of sketchiness, even the protagonist: where does Satya(a subdued J. D. Chakravarthy) come from, why does he behave like a trained Ninja when he is supposedly a virgin to violence?
Did Urmila Matondkar actually wear sarees that cost Rs 500? Even if she did , she changes into so many of them it feels a tad over-fashionable for a film where the characters look like the haven’t bathed for days and weeks. As for Shefali Shah’s stylishly manicured and painted nails, we can give them the benefit of the doubt: who says a hit-man’s wife cant afford to visit a beauty parlour?
27 years later Satya feels as raw wounded and visceral. Yes, this iconic elegy to gangsterism has aged well. Except for a few awkward preachifying portions which over-explain the nexus between crime and politics, Satya allows the doomed characters to speak for themselves. Deplorably there are so many gangsters and sidekicks killing, singing dancing drinking killing and smirking , the principal relationships , between Satya and Bhiku Mhatre( a spectacularly unspoilt Manoj Bajpayee), between Satya and Vidya, between Bhiku and his mercurial wife Pyari, between Bhiku and Kalu Mama (Saurabh Shukla)… all these potentially penetrating relationships get submerged in mounds of montage manifesting the ostensible killing field that Mumbai had become in the 1980s.
Varma dithers between authentic drama and theatrical drama. The difference between what the characters project in their cinematic version and what they actually are, is not entirely bridged by the director’s vibrant but disembodied vision.
Without a shred of doubt, there is more to Satya than meets the eye. Its flash killings and muted rage speak a language never witnessed in Indian cinema before. But that rebellious revolutionary idiom that Ram Gopal Varma hurls into Indian cinema in Satya never quite hits bull’s eye.
