Just the other day, I was thinking about how my ability and patience to sit through any film have now increased, and I don’t easily get bored or put off by them as I used to some years ago. I said to myself that I can watch any film now and thought of re-visiting all the films that I have closed in between due to their different appeal and unconventional pace. I was ready now. However, I didn’t know that just within days I would be sitting in a film, tiptoeing to make a decision between storming out and staying. I didn’t know that within days, someone could make a film like Animal that would just make me want to dismiss it completely.
Not because it has some unconventional storytelling that is just difficult to get hold of or has a really arduous way of moving the plot ahead, or because it has no plot at all. But a film that has everything right other than the filmmaker’s vile motives for which he is making it, due to which everything else turns out to be like his mind: disruptive, disgusting, and just absolutely deplorable to witness.
I would like to drift further to another film that was released earlier this year that made me think of something crucial about the nature of cinema on my second viewing. The film I am talking about is ‘Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani’, which uses emotions and storytelling devices to break societal notions. The particular moment in the film when Ranveer Singh dances on ‘Dola Re Dola’, made me realize how truly powerful the medium itself is. Its myriad ways can make you believe in new ways of seeing and thinking about the world. It can challenge what you thought you knew and present a completely different point of view, which you cannot help but root for. When emotions take over a particular concept and make their way to your heart through the journeys taken by characters. Cinema can achieve all of that through its techniques. RRKPK truly did that and represented the very nature of cinema for me. It is a virtue to be a filmmaker, and it is a triumph to tell a good story. And yet, like all virtues, even this one has its shortcomings. If the same tools can be used to destroy a regressive idea, they can be used to construct it too.
With ‘Animal’, Sandeep Reddy Vanga just wants to do that. Seeing Ranbir Kapoor, Anil Kapoor, and all the other thousand goons on the screen, there is a sharp presence of Vanga. He is the one, superimposing himself through the frames and giving an evil laugh while he looks at the audience looking at him. It is not Ranbir Kapoor’s Ranvijay or Bobby Deol’s Abrar who is the most dangerous, but Mr. Vanga, who is reflected through them. I am not even talking about the many ways in which the film is trying to be something completely vile. In a film where there is so much psychological trauma, distress, and a crumbling father-son bond in place, nothing is worthy of spending more time than just investing in the curious case of Sandeep Reddy Vanga.
Here is a storyteller (for I truly believe he is a good one if he just comes out of the shell he has created for himself) who is making a film 100 times more violent and incessantly, self-consciously, more problematic than his previous films. He acts like a toddler, who, when told not to do something, turns defensive and does it harder. He acts like all those men who, when told that they are wrong, don’t turn inward and introspect but rather take it upon themselves to do it even more the next time. That’s what he promised in the interview he gave to Anupama Chopra. When the creator of a world is a person who, when told not to pluck a flower from a plant, will instead break off the roots of the entire garden, it is futile to even say anything about the world he creates. Like his characters, he won’t bow down and accept; he won’t introspect and change, but just the opposite. Never has the fact that ‘a piece of art reflects the life of the artist’, been more true than in his case.
Through the 3 hours and 21 minutes of sheer massacre that we are shown on screen, there are minute glimpses of what Sandeep Reddy Vanga could really have been if he really was an authentic human as well. Especially in the climax, where Ranbir Kapoor and Anil Kapoor finally sit down to talk. It is a powerfully written scene and portrays the toxic nature of their relationship beautifully. If only Sandeep Vanga focused on creating more such scenes rather than just wanting to be a college-going knucklehead who will just do everything opposite of what he is told to.
In that respect, ‘Animal’ doesn’t work as a film. How will it, when the narrative has other venomous goals than just providing a resolution to the story; when the story is just a means to peddle into the arrogant mind of the maker who wants to show the world that he will keep doing only that, and in a much greater capacity, for which he has been criticized? It is a highly toxic masculine trait that causes a lot of anguish in many men. It is not his characters that need fixing; it is him.
‘Animal’ is a classic example of how to ruin a good story by bringing your grudges into it. It could have truly been a complex exploration of so many things that have not happened as much in mainstream Hindi cinema. It chooses to base itself on the truly disruptive mind of the character but then takes a completely different turn to show its real destination, which is nothing like what the correct destination would have been. It is Sandeep Reddy Vanga being truly, comfortably self-indulgent to an extent that he even crosses the boundary of arrogance to reach a stage beyond that. If films are made with such motives, how do we call them films?
I would refrain from making such dictatorial statements and leave the film as it is. If it were up to me, I would want to forget that I sat through the 3 and a half hours of mindless, venomous, blood-thirsty egoistic exploitation of the medium masquerading as a film. I am no purist, and I don’t want to define what film is and what it isn’t; however, with how Animal plays out and, more importantly, the skewed dimensions that it brings of the filmmaker, it makes me want to dismiss it to the core.
KuchTohBhi 