This edition of Subhash K Jha’s Thus Day That Year features looks back at Durga, which released in 2002.
Chakravarthy, who played the title role in Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya, has gone on record to claim some experience in filmmaking before attempting to make this film. We don’t know how far this is true. As far as we know, Chakravarthy was spotted on the sets of a movie by Varma and cast in Satya.
By borrowing heavily from Satya and even cartlifting a face from Varma’s camp to play his best friend and sidekick, Chakravarthy cannot claim to be qualified to make a feature film. He makes a mayhem-gorged mess out of a plot that’s ridiculously self-important.
Like Ram Gopal Varma’s Shiva, Durga opens on a college campus where we see the protagonist Durga and his friends behaving like overgrown adolescents looking for a first date. So clumsy is the actor-director’s depiction of campus revelry that we wonder what more creative atrocities Chakravarthy has in store for us.
If we can call it that, the film builds into a perverse treatise on gangsterism. The gang war canvas tries to be self-consciously knowledgeable and intelligent. What we see are blotchy frames infested with darkly representative ganglords and scumbags who seem to be more remarkable for looking than feeling like their characters.
Chakravarthy splatters the film with gallons of gore to make us believe in the veracity of violence. But the film lacks inner conviction. There’s no attempt to stitch the pastiche of violence and sensitivity. The narrative follows no rules of aesthetic filmmaking. Like Ram Gopal Varma, Chakravarthy tries to make his own rules of shot composition and editing. But his patterns of filmmaking appear more to be a perverse parody of Varma’s cinema than an original depiction of gangsterism.
The performances are, at best, broadly representational. Many of the faces are from the Telugu film industry, clearly giving away the game. Durga is a rehashed version of a Telugu film directed by Shankar, which opened dismally some time ago. Chakravarthy took over the film for the Hindi market, dubbed portions, and retained the action and song sequences. The end product looks strange and twisted.
Periodically, the film takes off for song sequences on foreign shores where the lead pair rolls in mud, dunks themselves in water, slithers, and slides in mock copulation. So much for a raw and realistic film about a ganglord’s son trying to make a clean break from his messy past.
Chakravarthy’s climactic harangue of peace and non-violence, with all the goons dropping their weapons as though they had just heard a neo-Gandhi speak pearls of wisdom, makes us titter in bitter resentment. The climax done amidst a street mob is “real” in a very ostentatious and overpowering way. Throughout this tortuous film, the actor-director tries to draw attention to his definition of real cinema. But gore without restrain is a bore. In Durga, all we see is a man trying desperately to be one-up on his mentor(Ram Gopal Varma), ending up being our tormentor.
While Chakravarthy apes Kamal Haasan blandly as an actor, as a director, he’s Ram Gopal Varma’s protegee all the way. The leading lady, Priyanka(no relation to the lovely Priyanka Chopra), is another mannequin with little staying power. Vidya Sagar’s music score sounds like what it is: Telugu songs transposed strenuously into an alien tongue.
