When a director helms a film that grows into a phenomenon, he can become so closely associated with it that his other movies might get downgraded or overlooked. But in the long run, enthusiastic movie buffs might revisit those less popular works and find unexpected points of interest in them. This often 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 brief phone conversation with director-screenwriter Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra — a prelude to a panel discussion I’m moderating with him. Mehra is best known for Rang de Basanti, one of the most influential Hindi movies of the past decade. Combining the vitality of snappily paced, audience-pleasing 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 huge 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 about 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 very disparate works. The first is a slick if overlong psychological thriller about a cop (Amitabh Bachchan in one of his finest 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 in passing during our talk. We had to move on to other topics and he never got a chance to elaborate, but this is what I think he may have meant: both films use masks and reflections as ways of concealing or revealing things about their protagonists — and by extension, about human beings in general. Both also use extensive Ramayana imagery to play out the idea that each of us carries a potential Rama and a potential Ravana within us.
Aks (which means “reflection”) is very overtly a story about good and evil being mirror images — one defines the other, the film repeatedly tells us — but this theme recurs in Delhi 6 too. An idiot savant living in the basti literally holds a mirror up to society, but everyone ignores or makes fun of him — until the end, when communal frenzy bring out the hidden demons in many of the characters. 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.
Equally notable is Mehra’s unselfconscious mixing of Western pop culture with Indian mythology. Thus Aks centres on a psychopath who seems drawn from the dark Hollywood serial killer movie but quotes the Bhagwad Gita, while Delhi 6 contains a remarkable song sequence where Times Square comes to Chandni Chowk, and Lord Hanuman and King Kong occupy the same space. That primal ape is in all of us regardless of our backgrounds, the films seem to be saying; keep a mirror handy.
While I wouldn’t say Delhi 6 or Aks are unflawed movies (their endings are particularly laboured), they are both more provocative in some ways than Rang de Basanti, with its relatively straight-faced message-mongering.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer
