Subhash K Jha examines the one where Kangana did a version of Uma Thurman’s Kill Bill in Sai Kabir‘s Revolver Rani (2014).
In a scene straight out of a street play, Kangana Ranaut, playing what seems like a cross between Uma Thurman in Kill Bill and Seema Biswas in Bandit Queen, Kangana in Revolver Rani which clocks 11 years on April 25, tells the mother of a young girl, “Teach her how to shoot a gun. It’s the only way she can survive.”
Revolver Rani (RR) is an enormously disturbing and yet deeply satisfying tribute to many things at the same time. Director Sai Kabir (who had previously directed an unreleased film) pays a hefty homage to many filmmakers, among them Anurag Kashyap, Vishal Bharadwaj, Quentin Tarantino, Mehboob Khan, and Shekhar Kapoor. And yet, for all its derivative aspirations, RR is a fiercely original piece of cinema, crafted with compelling concentration and impassioned intuition. The mayhem is meticulously executed. It serves as the evocative backdrop for the life of an outlawed bandit-politician.
Ranaut plays a woman of substance who, going by her high-octane energy level, seems to be guilty of substance abuse. And that’s the least of her crimes. Alka Singh, as played by Ranaut, is the female goon who speaks most eloquently with the nozzle of her gun. There is an awkwardness to her Chambal ki boli that dissolves when she has to converse with a bandook ki goli.
Ranaut’s askew personality and her lisping, halting dialogue delivery give her character that cutting edge, which signifies a remarkable performance and takes a potentially powerful performance into the realm of the truly inspired.
I wonder what Alka Singh would have been if Ranaut had not played this feisty woman! Alka’s epic saga is partly cartoonish, partly a documentary on bandit politics spliced together to make the woman an outrageously endearing outlaw.
At heart, RR is a heart-grating love story of a crass, powerful female politician who falls for a sleazy, selfish Bollywood aspirant. We can see what a jerk he is. She can’t. As she goes through a sham marriage and a very real pregnancy with the certifiable asshole, Kangna’s character’s blind love turns into frustration and fury in front of our eyes.
Vir Das, yes, the same Guru of cynical giggles, plays the wannabe star who ends up as a trapped fluttering toyboy to the lusty politician, with an intimacy and incredulity that make the character appear both cheesy and pathetic and yet comic.
In the lust-relationship Sai Kabir reverses the traditional gender equation making the female hero the sex-hungry predator and the male companion an object of her lust. In the second half, when Alka Singh wants to turn her infernal kingdom into a nursery of paradisaical normalcy, the director indulges and pampers her womanly instincts without mocking the trigger-happy woman’s sudden swerve into softness and femininity.
The other qualifying relationship in Alka Singh’s life is the one that she shares with her uncle, played with habitual authenticity and unconditional credibility by Piyush Mishra. Mishra plays the kind of ambitious power behind the protagonist’s throne, who would stop at nothing to realize his furious political ambitions.
It’s a dangerously unbalanced world filled with outrageous deceit yet seeking some semblance of normalcy. Sai Kabir pulls out all the stops to let his protagonist swim in the tides of blood and anarchy. Wading through the muck, Alka endeavours to find herself a Utopian balance in her unbalanced world. The end is a shocker, as it knocks off the bottom of Alka’s world and lets her slide into the abyss without prejudice.
Revolver Rani is a film of baffling contradictions and anomalies. It starts with ten minutes of dreadfully self-conscious political humour (change the prelude, Mr Director!) and then steers adroitly into Alka’s love life with a cocky contempt for conventional signposts of female empowerment. The feminist hoardings are all bypassed in favour of creating untried rules of unorthodox womanhood.
More than the political intrigue, I was enthralled by Ranaut’s growing love for the thoroughly undeserving ‘Cham-cham’ (yup, that’s the cheesy nickname for her toy boy). The desperate passion she feels for this cad is so palpable as to make love appear as the greatest crime in Alka Singh’s world of pervasive outlawry.
Director Sai Kabir’s film is wacky, goofy, and ultimately acutely tragic. The proceedings in the plot are as unpredictable as its kinky, capricious female hero’s untameable curls. All steel guns and iron bras, Revolver Rani is raunchy, sexy, quirky, and fey. Giving a feverish vigour and velocity to Ranaut’s Phoolon-on-steroids act are Aarti Bajaj’s unsparing editing and Suhas Gujarathi’s state-of-art cinematography that misses nothing and spares no one. Media persons are ruthlessly satirized. The female anchor who comes on intermittently with updates on Alka’s bedroom and boardroom politics makes Ghalib sound like Yo Yo Honey Singh.
She is wickedly funny without knowing it. This is a whacked-out world where violence is born of an innocent misinterpretation of politics as a place for bullies and businessmen.
Like Ranaut’s Alka Singh, there is no artifice in the technique applied to the proceedings in the plot. Revolver Rani is as real as a comic book heroine can get. And if that seems like an irreconcilable merger of two separate worlds, then so be it.
Kangana Ranaut plays a female goon in the movie, while Vir Das plays her toy boy. Reflecting upon moments in the film, director Sai Kabir said: “I wanted to create a toy world in the film. I wanted the audiences to feel they were inside a toy while watching the film. I am a big fan of Johnnie To and Robert Rodriguez. When Kangana takes Vir to the Film City that she has built for him, it’s like being inside a gigantic toy. Taking shortcuts to get where young people want to get is an accepted form of immoral behaviour. It’s cool to be corrupt for the sake of your desires and dreams. Youngsters who take shortcuts think they can get away with it. They think they can do something in the stock market and get out with some fast bucks. But it doesn’t work that way. The whole ‘Modern Indian Dream’ is a bloody bubble. I don’t know if that comic-book feeling comes across. If you see the way the story unfolds, there are no Bollywood references in Revolver Rani at all. It’s actually a celebration of gutter-level existence. Kangana is part of that guttural existence until she becomes pregnant. The baby symbolizes a surreal divine intervention. From her gutter-level insane existence, she wants to move towards purity and sanity. The baby symbolizes sanity, purity, and innocence. But she can’t quit the gutter. It’s not just about Madhya Pradesh or the Chambal Valley. My political references are taken from all over the country. Tribals being usurped from their roots, power plants being unconstitutionally sanctioned…these are epidemic political issues…but it’s all depicted in comic-book fashion. To be honest, I knew such aggressive sexuality in the female protagonist would definitely generate interest in the male audience. But at the same time, I also thought this kind of naked female lust would also connect with the female audience. On the face of it, women may deny strong sexual feelings. But somewhere, Kangana’s character’s libido is a fantasy that women surely identify with. Why should only Bollywood heroes play eternal Casanovas while heroines are supposed to remain coy about sex? I thought Kangana’s mixture of love and lust for Vir Das is liberating in many ways.”
