An experiment! We all watched the same movie, and now I have to review it. Which is A LOT of pressure on me, since for once you have all seen the movie as recently as me and probably understood it better. Oh well, you can think of this as a starting point for a discussion, not the end.
Going in, I knew 2 things about this movie: massive cast, and based on a cross between The Godfather and The Mahabharata. And both of those facts are true, and somewhat related to each other. In order for him to have the cast he wanted and make them be the characters he wanted, Prakash Jha had to blend the two stories together. What really surprised me was the other stories that ended up sifting to the surface, specifically related to the women characters. Part of that was the hidden 3rd source for the film, the Nehru-Gandhi family and real life Indian politics in which women often play a prominent role. But part of it was Jha just going where the writing took him and landing in some unexpected places.
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And Jha also going where his actors took him. That is the main reason many of you have been asking me to watch this movie, because the cast is so interesting to see all together. And for most of them, this is a performance unlike any other in their career.
He also tends to see something a little different in his actors. He made Madhuri Dixit, at the height of her fame as a gorgeous glamorous woman, into a voice for abused wives in villages. He saw Kajol as a tragic single unmarried mother back when everyone else saw her as the cheerful tomboy. And in this film (and in Chakravyuh a few years later) he saw former male model Arjun Rampal as a potential powerful actor.
The thing is, the actual directing part of the movie, the way shots are framed and the way they are put together and flow one from the other, is pretty bland. Jha is great at assembling this cast and this story, but not so good at actually telling it in the most effective way possible.
It becomes an issue in combination with the second problem. There are many stories in this film and some of them are far more compelling than others. As we are wrenched from the interesting to less interesting stories, suddenly the slowness of the pace, the beige-ness of the visuals forces itself onto our attention more and more.
Next there is the Mahabharata. A young woman has a relationship with a powerful man (the Sun God) when she is a teenager. She gives birth to a child she must abandon, then moves on to a respectable marriage to a powerful man. Her husband dies and her children end up trapped in a complicated inheritance dispute against their uncle and cousins. On their side, they have a wise tricky adviser, Krishna. And the strong wife shared by them all, Draupadi. By the side of their cousin is a lowborn but brilliant warrior, one who the heroes dismissed and insulted at their first meeting while their cousin praised him, Karna. Karna is told just before the final battle that his mother is the mother of his enemies, she goes to him and explains that she had to give him up but now wants him to return home, to accept her love and take his place as the oldest son and leader of the brothers. He agonizes, but refuses, because he has a loyalty to the one man who befriended him when he was nothing. He promises his mother not to kill any of his brothers, but remains on the other side. His brothers kill him and are told after his death by their mother what his true identity was. In death, he receives his missing honors.
And finally there is the real story of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty which receives just a faint subconscious reference here. Nehru died, and his daughter carried on his work. She had two sons, the oldest was the expected heir, strong and involved in politics, the youngest was almost forgotten, married to a foreigner, living a regular life. The oldest died, and the youngest stepped up and joined politics. His mother died, and he became prime minister. He died, and unexpectedly his foreign born wife became the leader of the party.
(This song is way better edited than the film itself, and notice how there is more Arjun and Katrina than Ranbir? It sells a conflict between Arjun and Ajay with Katrina in the corner and Ranbir just flashing by off and on)
Shruthi Seth is actually pretty well known among my generation because she played the Indian equivalent of Sabrina the Teenage Witch essentially in Shararat in which Farida Halal starred as her grandmom..So she evokes a sense of nostalgia whenever we see her in ads or movies
The Mahabharata (as I understand it) is supposed to be a story of shades of grey. The Ramayana is about a perfect ideal hero, but the Mahabharata is about a bunch of people who are slightly better than the other people but still make their fair share of mistakes. The idea of moving this massive ware with dozens of allies on each side fighting their own battles into the realm of politics was brilliant. Because it allows for that same sense of shifting loyalties and many moving parts each of which matter.
Interesting to think about the point being to trust no one. Katrina seems like the pure character. Naive and childish, yes, but never actually wrong. And then aging into being the ideal wife and then the ideal widow. Until there is the flip and we see her giving a political speech with Nana nodding in the background and realize she is under the spell of politics now, no longer apart from it.
But I think the film might have worked better if Arjun and Ranbir had swapped roles. Arjun has real range and can play a layered internal character, whereas Ranbir had a more limited range but excels at characters that play their emotions on their faces.
You are saying that the Indhira, Sanjay, Rajiv, Sonia Gandhi story is the hidden Easter egg. But my recall is that, at the time, the Gandhi saga was the selling point, especially the curiosity to see Katrina as Sonia, (and of course Ranbir in anything), as well as the first powerhouse cast since Omkara, and Mahabharata and Godfather were the Easter eggs.
If I am remembering correctly, Arjun and Manoj then leave the hospital room and Arjun is surrounded by happy loyal supporters and Manoj is alone. Is that right? I thought it was becauuse Arjun had been selected as the leader (because the subtitles flashed by too quick), but from what you are saying, that was a sign that Arjun was a natural leader who was naturally beloved, while Manoj was alone and bitter.
Sarkar is good, but it glorifies the central family even more than The Godfather. So if that makes you uncomfortable, may not be worth it. Qarib Qarib Singlle is also recently on Netflix I noticed, a delightful little romance with Irrfan Khan and Parvathy in a terrible sari, if you are in the mood for that.
Your point about the power is exactly what was bothering me about this movie. I honestly felt that none of the characters actually cared about the people, they only cared about the power. I thought Ajay would be the person that actually cared about the people but I felt like even his character was in it for the power.
Yes, exactly. Ajay starts out being an authentic voice who wants to represent the struggles of the people and then he just starts murdering and strongarming people however Manoj needs him to, when Manoj is the son of the party leader he had such a violent resistance to at the beginning.
Now I am playing the movie in my head with the ewkward sex scene removed, and the whole thing works better. Cut the follow up false rape accusation too. And then Arjun is an angry passionate guy who loves his brother and wants power, his big feud is with the cop who stopped him from seeing his dying brother and hit Ranbir, and we can believe he was surprised by love after marriage to Kat. The Shruti Seth plot just adds mess to the film for no real purpose, it could have been accomplished in a different way.
Raajneeti was shot extensively in Bhopal.[4] The title, which translates literally as "Politics" and contextually as "Affairs of State", was promoted with the tag-line "Politics and Beyond..."[5]
Bharti Rai, the daughter of Ramnath Rai, an eminent politician, bears an illicit son from rival leftist leader Bhaskar Sanyal. The son is abandoned by Brij Gopal, Bharti's brother. Bharti is married to Chandra Pratap, younger brother of Bhanu Pratap, who leads the Rashtrawadi party.
The minority state government collapses when Rashtrawadi party withdraws its support. Bhanu Pratap suffers a stroke and hands over power to Chandra Pratap. Chandra's elder son, Prithvi Pratap, tries to take advantage of his father's power, which results in a clash with his cousin, Veerendra Pratap. For the upcoming mid-term polls, Prithvi rejects the nomination of local leader Sooraj Kumar, who is chosen by the common people. Sooraj gets Veerendra's support instead. Unknown to all, Sooraj is Bharti's abandoned son, who was found and brought up by the Pratap family's driver Ram Charittra and his wife. When Sooraj demands a candidacy in the elections, Brij Gopal shrewdly nominates his father Ram. Chandra Pratap's younger son, Samar Pratap, returns from the United States. His childhood friend Indu, proposes to him, but he declines.
In order to regain his power and be the chief-ministerial candidate in the state assembly election, Veerendra has Chandra Pratap assassinated and Prithvi is arrested. SP Sharma, under Veerendra's influence, presses rape charges against Prithvi. In order to bail him out, Samar promises Veerendra of Prithvi's resignation. However, Samar and Prithvi begin rallying public support. The bed-ridden Bhanu Pratap expels Prithvi, who forms the new Jana Shakti party. To raise funds for the new party from Indu's industrialist father, Samar ensures Prithvi's marriage to Indu against her will. Meanwhile, Samar's American girlfriend Sarah arrives in India to meet him.
Samar kills Babulal, an old party associate of Bhanu Pratap, after uncovering that Sooraj and Veerendra had murdered his father. Prithvi kills SP Sharma. Sarah realizes that the two brothers are committing political murders and decides to return to the US, pregnant. Veerendra and Sooraj plan to assassinate Samar by planting a bomb in his car, but it is Prithvi and Sarah who perish in the explosion. Sooraj is revealed to be the first child of Bharti.
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