|
Review: Guru (Hindi;
2007)
“GURU WAS AMAZING!!! First
off, I would officially like to state that SRK actually has competition
with Madhavan in my life. I watched all of his hindi movies, and hes acted
AMAZING in all of them, including Guru. Now the movie Guru was very well
made. The story line extremely convincing and realistic (Mallika Sherawat
was unnecessary and really needs to learn how to dance if shes going to
be a belly dancer). Aishwariya was just a side kick, not a bad job I must
say (especially compared to her role as Sunheri in Dhoom 2 BLAH). but anyone
could have done her part. Vidya Balan and Madhavan lock lips, but i think
it was important on their behalf to make their love convincing to the audience
(you will understand once you watch the movie). Mithun Chakrobarthy did
well for his part and Vidhya Balan charming as always (even in a wheel
chair!) But all hats go off to Abhishek Bachchan for his acting (best acting
yet). I saw a huge resemblence in his acting with his father, the one and
only Amitabh Bachchan, but none the less, Abhi convinces the viewers of
his role as Gurukant Desai. Well made movie, songs were on an average scale,
but great job Mr.Ratnam. By far, Guru is the movie of the year! My rating:
8/10 .Ek lo ek muft ("Buy one get one free") appears to be the lot of Gurukant
Desai (Abhishek Bachchan), that is to say the law of, not unintended consequences,
but unintended benefits. When as a boy he fails his exams he is able to
wrangle permission from his schoolmaster father to go to Turkey and sell
petrol cans, permission that would not have been forthcoming had he passed
his school exams.
When he wants a business
partner (Jignesh, played by Arya Babbar) he gets a wife too, none other
than Jignesh's sister Sujatha (Aishwariya Rai). And when he gets his wife's
dowry - the initial capital for his business - he also gets a devoted spouse
who radiates quiet strength. When they want a child they get twins. Heck,
by film's end we see that in amassing wealth and success Guru gets to wear
- muft - the mantle of corporate populist, bringing capitalism and its
benefits to the masses. In fact, when Guru arrives in Bombay he gets a
surrogate father in "Nanaji" Manikdas Gupta (Mithun Chakraborty), and -
also muft - a crusader adversary (egged on by newspaper baron Gupta) in
Shyam Saxena (Madhavan), a journalist determined to bring Guru down. Oh
well: five out of six ain't bad.
Mani Ratnam's Guru is the
story of Gurukant Desai, a villager from Idhar, Gujarat, convinced of his
lucky star and determined to succeed in bijness at all costs, no matter
the attempts of the corporate establishment to keep him out, and the zeal
of a leftist newspaper baron and his editor in bringing him down. His destiny
is already written, Gurukant informs a skeptic early on in the film, and
there is never any doubt that he is going to end up a business titan, second
to none.
But Guru is also the story
(as Ratnam sees it) of an India in transition, from colonialism through
license raj to free enterprise. As Ratnam concludes the tale the journey
is a heroic one indeed, from an India where outsized ambition - in particular,
the ambition of amassing great wealth - was frowned upon, to an India where
the acquisition of wealth is seen as the great leveler, representing the
best hope of the ordinary man for prosperity and happiness.
Ratnam is not blind to the
warts inherent in an ambition that will stop at nothing to achieve its
aim, and over the course of the film we see the affable, irrepressibly
optimistic Guru become less and less accessible, "available" only in private
settings or in orchestrated public spectacles before the shareholders of
his company, Shakti Trading. Guru's actions too become ever more obscure,
available to the audience only through the prism of Nanaji and Shyam. The
wide-eyed youth who turned down a coveted job in Turkey to return to India
in order to start his own business seems like a distant memory indeed.
But in order to shoehorn
his own vision into an overarching narrative of Guru triumphant, Ratnam
has to cut some corners: when the journalistic crusade against Guru leads
to a government crackdown and a commission of inquiry, Ratnam simply hands
over the film to its title character, who proceeds to hold forth as the
public incarnate, not bothering to deny any of the allegations of corruption
and fraud leveled against him but justifying his transgressions by appealing
to a higher law, not God but the public.
"I am the public," Guru rasps
in the film's memorable (and troubling) penultimate sequence, and it is
clear that he feels his actions are justified because he has empowered
the middle classes, and given them a stake in Indian industry. (He has
done so by means of Shakti Trading's various public offerings, the polar
opposite of the family-run and closed corporation that, Guru suggests,
held sway prior to his rise). While the film has hitherto led us to view
such claims a bit askance, there is no trace of directorial irony in this
sequence, carefully constructed to give Gurukant Desai the last word and
to leave him the winner. It's unclear whether Ratnam buys into this, but
he certainly wants the audience to buy whatever Guru is selling.
None of this detracts from
the fact that Ratnam remains arguably the least judgmental of popular directors
in either Hindi or Tamil, and the cinematic magnanimity - able to take
in a rather wide range of activity without malice or moralizing - that
we have come to expect from films like Mouna Raagam, Nayakan, Iruvar, Dil
Se, Alai Payuthey, Kannathil Muthamittal, and Aayitha Ezhuthu/Yuva is very
much a hallmark of Guru.
Thus we see that Gurukant
marries Sujatha because of her dowry, and we see that he is not above smearing
his corporate rivals via the media, or even of whipping up a little class
hatred by resorting a little too easily to an "us" versus "them" rhetoric
- yet we do not judge him. And nor is he the only one: we see Nanaji insulting
Sujatha after she has come to his house to show him her babies; we see
that Shyam Saxena is not above a little skullduggery himself if it makes
for a racier story; and we see that the upright leftist Nanaji's daughter
Meenu (Vidya Balan) appears to be thrilled that Guru manages to get away
with everything - thrilled just because - and we do not judge any of them
either.
So too with the wider questions
raised by Guru. It is surely a fact that, as Guru caustically observes,
the license raj regime made it incredibly hard for entrepreneurs to succeed,
thereby enabling the rich to get richer and to keep newcomers out of the
market, or at least to deny them a seat at the "main" table (though Ratnam
should have done more with the point that the same entrepreneurs who complained
about the license raj also used it to entrench and enrich themselves).
I can certainly agree with Guru's complaint at film's end that he is a
creature of the license raj system, and that the latter incentivizes corruption.
But it is also equally a
fact that a bureaucrat-heavy system criminalizing ordinary entreprenurial
activity is one thing, but - as Shyam Saxena points out - at least some
of what Guru does cannot be classified as ordinary entrepreneurial activity.
A case in point is when his company commits fraud by getting something
for nothing, that is, by sending empty cartons abroad and reporting those
as polyester exports. Shakti Trading would then use the export credits
thereby received to secure licenses for importing machinery and goods that
it could then resell at great profit.
There is something more than
a little self-serving about Guru's self-righteousness, and to his credit
Ratnam sees that too. That Guru gets to win by film's end is not because
he is right but because the public accepts his position to be right. One
might see this as a shamelessly commercial decision on Ratnam's part, well
aware that the mood of the moviegoing public - or at least that portion
of the public that may be expected to patronize Ratnam films in multiplexes
- is unabashedly gung ho about entrepreneurship at present. Iindeed it
is difficult to imagine a figure more calculated to revolt contemporary
India's urban well-heeled than the manifestly leftie, ultra-smug journalist
Shyam Saxena.
On the other hand, one might
also read Guru's vindication by film's end as logically following from
past Ratnam films, an instance of Ratnam's refusal to pass final judgment.
Thus, in Iruvar, Anandam (Mohanlal) bests his one-time mentor and friend
Tamilchelvam (Prakashraj) in politics not because he is better than the
latter, but because that's what "the people" want. So too in Guru: the
public wants what Gurukant Desai sells, and as in Iruvar, Ratnam bows to
the press of history. Iruvar's Tamilchelvam was left with the memory of
a friendship and of a historical moment; to the Gurukant Desais of the
world belongs the future.
No discussion of a Ratnam
film since Roja can be complete without mention of A.R. Rahman's music.
I have already spoken at length of the album, but the background score
is - even by Rahman's lofty standards - impressive. The impact of the songs
is greatly heightened by their use in the film, in particular the ones
- "Ae Hairat-e-Aashiqui" being the most significant of these - that recur
in the background at various points over the course of the film, binding
together and juxtaposing different stages in the lives of Guru (and Sujatha).
That being said, Ratnam's visuals in the songs do not match the peaks of
"Pachchai Nirame" (from Alai Payuthey), "Kannathil Muthamittal" (from the
film of the same name), "Narumugaiye" (from Iruvar), "Goodbye Nenba/Khuda
Hafiz" (from Aayitha Ezhuthu/Yuva), or "Satrangi Re" (from Dil Se), although
there are some spectacular visuals in "Barso Re", and striking ones in
"Ek Lo Ek Muft", and "Mayya Mayya".
Rajeev Menon's cinematography
is consistently of very high quality — in particular, the film features
several jawdropping landscape and monument shots. While this viewer did
find himself missing the virtuosity of Kannathil Muthamittal, it is clear
that Ratnam has rather deliberately gone in a for a far more accessible
visual aesthetic, one reflecting his ambitions for Guru as an all-India
film. In a similar vein, the set of Bombay in the 1950s is a landmark in
Indian cinema, and worthy of the man who directed Thotta Tharani's Dharavi
in Nayakan.
Returning to the film's penultimate
scene, if Guru's harangue jars because it does not really follow from what
has preceded it - Guru has always been in the game to make money, not to
benefit the middle classes by giving them a stake in his company; indeed
Shakti Trading's first public offering is simply a consequence of the banks'
unwillingness to lend to the new kid on the block - the film does not really
suffer from it. The reason is Abhishek Bachchan, who carries the scene
(and the rest of the film) off with a bravura performance that is surely
one for the ages.
Abhishek exhibits great range
in this role, and is convincing and compelling - in a word, superb - in
all his character's hues, from the wide-eyed youngster to the determined
businessman to the unctuous, self-satisfied middle-aged tycoon, and finally
as a stroke-riddled icon, a prophet of the future. Perhaps the finest compliment
one can pay his work here is to say that Ratnam puts him on terrain previously
inhabited by Kamal Haasan in Nayakan, and Mohanlal in Iruvar, and Abhishek
does not let his director's faith down.
While Iruvar's Anandam remains
a class apart for Mohanlal's freakishly natural yet ineffably mysterious
act, I consider it no exaggeration to put Abhishek's Gurukant on at least
the same level as Kamal's Velu Naicker - not to mention that Abhishek's
screen presence and charisma comfortably outdo that of his illustrious
forebear. On more than one occasion one discerns traces of Amitabh Bachchan's
own legendary turn as Vijay Deenanath Chauhan in Agneepath, yet the intersection
of these two trajectories - Amitabh's legacy and Ratnam's Tamil cinema
- results in a performance that while owing many debts, is at the same
time very much Abhishek's own.
It is fortunate - for Guru,
which could not otherwise "work" at any level - that Abhishek is in such
good form, for he needed to be given the presence of Mithun Chakraborty
and Madhavan in the cast. The former's is the more obvious performance,
solid and effective at all times but not especially nuanced. In a relative
sense, and despite being abruptly written out of the film, it is Madhavan
who tests Abhishek's dominance the most in this film, with a quietly strong
performance bordering on the sinister: contempt for Guru and everything
he represents shines in Madhavan's eyes virtually every time he is on screen.
In particular, Madhavan's entry scene, featuring Mithun and Abhishek as
well, is a masala fan's delight. So is the only other meeting between Shyam
Saxena and Guru, where Madhavan's understated naturalness serves as a great
foil to Abhisek's anger.
Aishwariya Rai had a lot
more to do in this film than I had initially expected, and after Iruvar
and Guru it is now clear that Ratnam is able to get more from her than
just about anyone else. At no point is she less than convincing, first
as the spunky village girl and then as Guru's wife. Especially welcome
is Ratnam's characterization of Sujatha as an equal partner in her marriage,
a relief given the rampant sexism of so much of our cinema. Aishwariya's
Sujatha inspires confidence, even when she isn't saying anything.
Vidya Balan's Meenu is an
intriguing character, afflicted by multiple sclerosis and clearly fascinated
by Guru's audacity. While Ratnam does not explore her psychology as much
as I would have liked, one is left with the distinct impression that to
this young woman who lives with constant pain and the thought of impending
death, there is something immensely compelling about Guru's vitality, his
hunger for more of everything. Meenu keeps joking that she wants to marry
Guru, offering a glimpse of her psyche and of the position Guru holds within
it: outsider, rebel, and possessed of great appetite. In a word: life.
Mani Ratnam is one of my
favorite directors when it comes to capturing "little" scenes of the sort
that other directors either pass over or can only conceptualize in overwrought
terms. Guru is no exception, and there are a host of private moments that
make the characters human (indeed Guru far surpasses Nayakan in terms of
the number of memorable characters it features). Gurukant and Sujatha have
several of these (mostly in the film's first half; one of the casualties
of the second half's focus on Guru's struggles against Nanaji and Shyam
Saxena is the endearing relationship between husband and wife), including
a playful bedroom scene. Towards the end the couple re-visit their first
home in Bombay to reminisce, and although Ratnam inserts this scene somewhat
abruptly, the cocktail of affection and nostalgia - and an Abhishek-Aishwariya
pairing that is very comfortable and effective - is too strong to resist.
I conclude by noting that
Madhavan and Vidya Balan form a strange counterpoint to the Abhishek-Aishwariya
pair in the film's second half, and I was especially struck by the charming
romantic scene where Shyam asks Meenu to marry him. The scene is the only
indication we have that Shyam is more than just a relentless activist,
and goes a long way toward humanizing him. More significantly, Shyam's
response to Meenu's claim that there would be little purpose to marriage
as she only has four hundred-odd days to live - Shyam says he wants every
single one of those days - highlights the difference between Gurukant's
calculus - he decides to marry Sujatha upon hearing of her dowry - and
Shyam's own worldview. The four hundred days Shyam wants is not a question
of calculation, but of incalculable joy. Ratnam's irony here is dark indeed:
the latter couple is oriented towards death - Meenu will die, and die childless
- while Guru and Sujatha are oriented towards life - Gurukant will live,
and live to see his children grow up. The future, that is to say, is Guru's.
|
|