Post by talk2santosh on Mar 6, 2004 7:22:28 GMT -5
Ab Tak Chappan
SUBHASH K JHA
Starring : Nana Patekar, Nana Patekar & Nana Patekar. Also starring Yashpal Sharma,
Nakul Vaid, Prasad Purandhare.
Directed by : Shimit Amin
Rating : ***
The top cop talks to the underworld don with the contempt of familiarity. Dressing to go out shopping with his sweet wife, getting into the car and driving off…. Sadhu Agashe treats the gangster on the cellphone with a gritty casualness, even offering to let him say hello to the wifey who just rolls her eyes in that boys-will-be-boys way which all cops’ wives adopt in our movies.
That stirring mix of everyday headlines and a treatment that’s cinematic in the style of Steven Sodenberg or nearer home, Ritwick Ghatak, is what makes Ab Tak Chappan a svelte slice of creativity.
Like all works of art Chappan can be viewed in 57 ways(so to speak). It can be seen as a
scrupulously documented film on the life of the special police squad, the encounter specialists who have the extra-constitutional authority to eliminate hardcore criminals whom the law cannot get.
Being a film editor debutant director Shimit Amin cuts his material like a knife. The first few killings are graphically delineated. The sounds of Hindi film songs and the hubbub of every day life lend a texture of ‘normalcy’ to the bizarre ‘legal murder’. The encounter between Sadhu and the newly recruited rookie Jatin(Nakul Vaid, who reprises Tusshar Kapoor’s role from Khakee) in a crowded apartment block is stunning.
But then haven’t we seen such picturesqueely casual slayings in scores of films, many of them from Ram Gopal Varma, already? That, in a complex nutshell is the problem with this remarkably even-pitched chronicle of a hysterically violent circumstance. We’ve seen a lot of the film’s content in several underworld films, gangsters epics and two recent ‘encounter’ dramas(Encounter and Kagaar). The shock value of watching a legel- eagle gunning down criminals in cold blood is considerably diminished by the deja-vu factor.
What rescues the film from being just another mordant chronicle of the cops-underworld nexus is Shimit Amin’s absolutely original and unsentimental take on the subject. Nowhere does he stand judgement on the right and wrong of encounter killings. He allows the cops, with all their in-house bickerings and jealousies, to do their job while he the director, does his.
The absence of sentimentality is at times distracting. And when the cop’s wife is gunned down we almost expect the tear ducts to be finally activated. Except for the remarkably written(Sandeep Shrivastava) climactic confrontation between the cop and the don(inspired by Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya) the landscape of mayhem is stripped of the maudlin mentality.
But you wish the director had allowed the relationship between Sadhu Agashe and the new recruit to be fleshed out with more feeling. The guru-chela bonding is restricted to sporadic scenes such as the brilliantly executed(oops!) dinner where the rookie Jatin brings his fiancee to Sadhu’s home, and that first day at work after Sadhu’s wife’s death when he tries to act his normal jokey and boorish self.
Nana Patekar carries off these and all the other episodes in his strangely violent character’s life with the aggressive elan of a street fighter. All of the actor’s innate violence is harnessed into a performance which is riveting raw and real. As played by Patekar, Sadhu Agashe is neither a cynic nor a believer. Just a man who does the dirty job because there’s no one else to do it.
Problems arise when the dirty job gets progressively murky. In the second-half Ab Tak Chappan sheds its documentary skin to assume a strikingly cinematic posture. The theory of poetic justice breaks into the raga of violence, cutting the edge out of the gritty no-nonsense tone of the first-half.
The sequence such as the one where Sadhu’s colleague(Yashpal Sharma, thoroughly typecast as a morally ambivalent establishment-guy) attempts to kill Sadhu in a fake ‘encounter’ are so showily ingenious, you wonder if they are the motivations behind making yet another film about cops, gangsters and co-gangsters.
Some portions pay a powerful homage to Ardh Satya. But the film neither surprises not stuns you. Rather, you watch Shimit Amin’s storytelling acumen with a detached curiosity. While Patekar rugged performance smoothens out the audiences’ discomfort of the familiar, there’re other remarkable aspects to the story, like Salim-Sulaiman’s background music which breaks into a sudden plaintive Sarod strain on Revathi’s death. But you can’t help comparing the score with Sandeep Chowta’s absolutely brilliant work in Varma’s Company.
Cinematographer Vishal Sinha gives the film a totally different look from Satya or Company thereby averting the impending peril of Chappan being designated the third part of Varma’s gangster trilogy.
And then there’s Nakul Vaid as the rookie. Wide-eyed, idealistic hero-worshipping …we’ve seen the character before. We’ll probbably see it again. Though not played in quite the same way. The same is true of the film too.
SUBHASH K JHA
Starring : Nana Patekar, Nana Patekar & Nana Patekar. Also starring Yashpal Sharma,
Nakul Vaid, Prasad Purandhare.
Directed by : Shimit Amin
Rating : ***
The top cop talks to the underworld don with the contempt of familiarity. Dressing to go out shopping with his sweet wife, getting into the car and driving off…. Sadhu Agashe treats the gangster on the cellphone with a gritty casualness, even offering to let him say hello to the wifey who just rolls her eyes in that boys-will-be-boys way which all cops’ wives adopt in our movies.
That stirring mix of everyday headlines and a treatment that’s cinematic in the style of Steven Sodenberg or nearer home, Ritwick Ghatak, is what makes Ab Tak Chappan a svelte slice of creativity.
Like all works of art Chappan can be viewed in 57 ways(so to speak). It can be seen as a
scrupulously documented film on the life of the special police squad, the encounter specialists who have the extra-constitutional authority to eliminate hardcore criminals whom the law cannot get.
Being a film editor debutant director Shimit Amin cuts his material like a knife. The first few killings are graphically delineated. The sounds of Hindi film songs and the hubbub of every day life lend a texture of ‘normalcy’ to the bizarre ‘legal murder’. The encounter between Sadhu and the newly recruited rookie Jatin(Nakul Vaid, who reprises Tusshar Kapoor’s role from Khakee) in a crowded apartment block is stunning.
But then haven’t we seen such picturesqueely casual slayings in scores of films, many of them from Ram Gopal Varma, already? That, in a complex nutshell is the problem with this remarkably even-pitched chronicle of a hysterically violent circumstance. We’ve seen a lot of the film’s content in several underworld films, gangsters epics and two recent ‘encounter’ dramas(Encounter and Kagaar). The shock value of watching a legel- eagle gunning down criminals in cold blood is considerably diminished by the deja-vu factor.
What rescues the film from being just another mordant chronicle of the cops-underworld nexus is Shimit Amin’s absolutely original and unsentimental take on the subject. Nowhere does he stand judgement on the right and wrong of encounter killings. He allows the cops, with all their in-house bickerings and jealousies, to do their job while he the director, does his.
The absence of sentimentality is at times distracting. And when the cop’s wife is gunned down we almost expect the tear ducts to be finally activated. Except for the remarkably written(Sandeep Shrivastava) climactic confrontation between the cop and the don(inspired by Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya) the landscape of mayhem is stripped of the maudlin mentality.
But you wish the director had allowed the relationship between Sadhu Agashe and the new recruit to be fleshed out with more feeling. The guru-chela bonding is restricted to sporadic scenes such as the brilliantly executed(oops!) dinner where the rookie Jatin brings his fiancee to Sadhu’s home, and that first day at work after Sadhu’s wife’s death when he tries to act his normal jokey and boorish self.
Nana Patekar carries off these and all the other episodes in his strangely violent character’s life with the aggressive elan of a street fighter. All of the actor’s innate violence is harnessed into a performance which is riveting raw and real. As played by Patekar, Sadhu Agashe is neither a cynic nor a believer. Just a man who does the dirty job because there’s no one else to do it.
Problems arise when the dirty job gets progressively murky. In the second-half Ab Tak Chappan sheds its documentary skin to assume a strikingly cinematic posture. The theory of poetic justice breaks into the raga of violence, cutting the edge out of the gritty no-nonsense tone of the first-half.
The sequence such as the one where Sadhu’s colleague(Yashpal Sharma, thoroughly typecast as a morally ambivalent establishment-guy) attempts to kill Sadhu in a fake ‘encounter’ are so showily ingenious, you wonder if they are the motivations behind making yet another film about cops, gangsters and co-gangsters.
Some portions pay a powerful homage to Ardh Satya. But the film neither surprises not stuns you. Rather, you watch Shimit Amin’s storytelling acumen with a detached curiosity. While Patekar rugged performance smoothens out the audiences’ discomfort of the familiar, there’re other remarkable aspects to the story, like Salim-Sulaiman’s background music which breaks into a sudden plaintive Sarod strain on Revathi’s death. But you can’t help comparing the score with Sandeep Chowta’s absolutely brilliant work in Varma’s Company.
Cinematographer Vishal Sinha gives the film a totally different look from Satya or Company thereby averting the impending peril of Chappan being designated the third part of Varma’s gangster trilogy.
And then there’s Nakul Vaid as the rookie. Wide-eyed, idealistic hero-worshipping …we’ve seen the character before. We’ll probbably see it again. Though not played in quite the same way. The same is true of the film too.