Aag Burns Out

By Mala Kumar 10 December 2007 174 views No Comment

The following thoughts ran through my head while sitting in the theatre, waiting for the screening of Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag to begin:

There are five minutes before the movie officially begins and my companions and I make up almost half of audience, compared to Heyy Babyy ’s full house next door.

There can’t be a good reason why Varma was not allowed to reuse the name Sholay for his remake of the movie.

Varma’s name being included in the full title of the movie is probably not a good sign, either. Neither is the fact that he directed, produced, AND wrote the movie.

Those misgivings turned out to be justified. A bloated and soulless modern-day remake of Ramesh Sippy’s 1975 classic Sholay , Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag symbolizes everything that is wrong with the Bollywood film industry at this point. Varma once made elegant, intelligent films deeply rooted in India’s culture and people – genuinely great movies whose spunky characters always managed to transcend stereotypes and labels. And of course, who could forget those memorable songs - the slow, thumping opening of ‘Rangeela Re’ and the arresting train whistle beat of ‘Ruti Ruti Yeh Zindagi’.

Yet his last few films have been over-the-top, pompous movies that made a spectacle of themselves, starting with Bhoot and its blatantly fake warning at the beginning of the movie cautioning audiences that the movie was so unbelievably frightening that it had been known to cause seizures in viewers.

Aag manages to be even worse than Bhoot, simply by existing. Sholay was a landmark in Indian cinema, creating movie stars out of all the leads and thus bringing about another generation of Bollywood stars out of their offspring. The general storyline concerns two criminals who are recruited by a former police chief to incarcerate a psychopathic bandit. Varma, unable to use all the original names, cleverly adjusted them in order to indicate who is supposed to be whom; hence, Gabbar Singh is now ‘Babban Singh’, and Veenu is ‘Heero’.

It seems as though Varma was so impressed with himself for coming up with the idea of remaking Sholay that he forgot to make an actual movie and not just a vehicle for his stylistic flourishes. There are tilted shots, shadowed faces, and erratic music, yet the acting is stilted at best. Ajay Devgan, who is usually excellent in his roles, ham-fists his way through his lines. Even Amitabh Bachchan as Gabbar seems decidedly lackluster in his role; his character is supposed to be crazed and ruthless, yet I would be hard-pressed to recall many scenes of Bachchan where he is not brooding in darkness. However, Nisha Kothari is the worst offender: it’s a mystery why Ram Gopal Varma is so enamoured with her ( Aag is his third movie with Kothari) because watching her as Ghungroo is like watching textbook examples of how not to act.

Urmila’s dance sequence is a perfect depiction of Bollywood’s sorry state: throwing sultry glances towards Amitabh Bachchan’s character and to the audience, she gyrates and twists sensuously to hypnotic, rhythmic music, yet close-ups of her face reveal the pock-marked and sallow skin of an aging woman. And in one of history’s most useless cameos, Abhishek Bachchan makes a surprise appearance as…some guy waving a gun around. Like an old man trying on skinny jeans, it’s all oddly futile.