Masks and mirrors

(Quick thoughts on two Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra films)

When a director helms a film that grows into a phenomenon, he can become so closely associated with it – especially if it came relatively early in his career – that his other movies might get downgraded or overlooked as a result. But in the long run, enthusiastic movie buffs might revisit those less popular works and find unexpected points of interest in them. This sometimes leads to critical reassessment; there are numerous examples through film history of a lower-profile work by a director eventually rising to supplant his acknowledged “masterpiece”.

I was thinking about this during a short phone conversation with director-screenwriter Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra – a prelude to our panel discussion at the Hindu Lit for Life festival on Sunday. Mehra is best known for Rang de Basanti, one of the most influential Hindi movies of the past decade. Combining the vitality of fast-paced, youthful, mass-audience cinema (and the presence of superstar Aamir Khan) with respectable subject matter (carefree youngsters become emotionally invested in their country’s problems and turn for inspiration to freedom fighters of the past), RDB was a big commercial and critical success – a rare combination in our cinema. Yet I think Mehra’s two other feature films are more interesting in terms of what they reveal of his artistic sensibilities and personal compulsions.

Those two films are his 2001 debut Aks and his 2009 production Delhi 6. On the surface these are quite disparate works. The first is a slick if overlong psychological thriller about a cop (Amitabh Bachchan in one of his best latter-day roles) who finds that his personality is being usurped by the maniacal killer he has apprehended. The second is an intimate “basti” story set in a Chandni Chowk community that becomes a microcosm of life in a chaotic country (as seen mainly through the eyes of a young visiting NRI).

“In a way, Delhi 6 was my attempt to remake Aks,” Mehra said during our phone chat. It was a casual remark, we had to quickly move on to other topics and he never got a chance to elaborate, but for me it tied in with some striking similarities between the two films. Both use masks and reflections as ways of concealing or revealing things about their protagonists – and by extension, about people in general. Both also contain extensive Ramayana imagery, with Rama and Ravana presented as mirror images. Aks (which means “reflection”) is very obviously a story about good and evil defining and complementing each other, but this theme recurs in Delhi 6 too. An idiot savant literally holds a mirror up to society, but everyone ignores or makes fun of him – until the end, when communal discord brings unpleasant things to the surface. An elaborate Ram Leela performance spread over days runs parallel to the film’s main narrative, a rampaging monkey man is used as a symbol for fear and paranoia in a divided community, and at the end the hero dons a monkey mask to try to make people see reason.

In both films, Mehra fuses elements of Western pop culture with elements from Indian mythology. Thus Aks centres on a psychopath who seems drawn from the dark Hollywood serial killer movie (there are references to The Devil’s Advocate too) but quotes the Bhagwad Gita (I love the irreverence of a back-story where a disturbed, Michael Myers-like child kills his parents after they teach him that death means nothing because the soul never dies). And Delhi 6 contains a song sequence where Times Square comes to Chandni Chowk, and Hanuman and King Kong occupy the same space (while the primal “kala bandar”, of course, resides inside all the characters).

There's no question that both films have their flaws: Aks is messy and uneven with poorly drawn supporting characters (and Nandita Das appears to have walked in from another, very different type of movie); and Delhi 6, though a brilliantly crafted ensemble film for its first hour and a half, has an annoyingly heavy-handed climax. But as examples of personal cinema, I think both are more provocative in some ways than Rang de Basanti, with its more conventional message-mongering.

[A sketchy session report is here. The bit about Mehra wanting to "adapt the story of Karan from Mahabharata - the episode in which his mother says she is not his mother" should be taken with a bit of salt]