Raavan

A disaster both from Mani Ratnam’s side as well as the lead actors’ interpretation of their characters.

There is a substantial cultural difference between the Tamilian calibration of Raavan’s position in The Ramayana and the Aryan measurement. He is a much more sympathetic character in the Dravidian narrative, and this is the version we see in Mani Ratnam’s Raavan.

Here, he is a dark-skinned male who kidnaps a beautiful woman with light eyes and fair skin because he believes that her husband’s alien system of law enforcement is a sham and brings suffering upon his community. It’s a challenging idea, but woefully executed.

Beera (Abhishek) is an aboriginal forest dweller in a magical land of waterfalls and verdant slopes. His sister (Priyamani) has been dishonoured by the local police and he swears vengeance. By abducting Ragini (Aishwarya),  he hopes to lure her police officer husband, Dev (Vikram), to his den. At the heart of his rage is an oppressive system that exploits a tribe of simple, illiterate people for whom the forest and its natural wealth is home.  

The adaptation of the ‘Raavan’ tale to a contemporary confrontation between two ways of life is admirable, but the absence of a dynamic in the script and the lead actors’ poor interpretation of  the characters they inhabit turns this movie into a disaster. Bachchan’s idea of Raavan is a man who makes faces at people and thumps his head like a madman. He seems unable, or unwilling, as an actor to create a persona that an audience can identify or empathise with. 

So, Raavan ends up a cardboard Ramayana extract with single dimensional characters. Even Hanuman (Govinda, playing a forest guard) is robbed of his joie de vivre and turned into a joker who swings from tree tops and travels on the roofs of police jeeps. The film is an aberration, hopefully, in Mani Ratnam’s distinguished oeuvre.

Abhishek BachchanadaptationMani Ratnam