The Bollywood Ticket
‘Rann’ delves into dark side of media - Movie Review
February 1, 2010
Starring Amitabh Bachchan, Sudeep, Ritesh Deshmukh, Paresh Rawal
While American media is floundering amid the wreckage of Internet-shattered business models and lowest-common-denominator content, the media in India is thriving. The Times of India now has the highest circulation of any English-language newspaper in the world (more than three million read it every day), major Indian cities often have several local newspapers, and television news is proliferating there. In fact, some U.S. journalism jobs are being outsourced to India. As Indian media gains in influence and has the potential to reap even greater profits, it’s confronting many of the same issues of power that the U.S. media has—namely, reconciling its public-service role as the essential Fourth Estate in any successful democracy and its need (or temptation, depending on your perspective) to make money as a business.
Director Ram Gopal Varma tackles this conflict in Rann. He’s best known for his mob movies, including Satya (1998), Company (2002), and Sarkar (2005)—although he’s also dabbled in horror, suspense, and psychological thrillers. Moral corruption tends to be his theme—and Rann is no exception, even though the subject—cable news—is a departure from his past work. What Varma gives us is not a media movie in the Hollywood tradition, like All The President’s Men (1976), The Paper (1994), and Frost/Nixon (2008), with scrappy reporters gumshoeing to get the scoop. Rather, Rann is a dark allegory, a medieval morality play for modern times, with a good father, a fallen son, and a devil in the guise of righteousness.
Amitabh Bachchan plays Vijay Harshwardhan Malik, a venerable broadcast journalist—like Walter Cronkite—the most trusted man in the country. His television channel, called India 24/7, is losing the ratings competition to a rival channel with a slick, unethical anchor named Amrish Kakkar (Mohnish Behl), who’s a former employee of India 24/7. Vijay's son Jai (Sudeep), who’s at the company helm, is desperate to boost viewership, and he’s willing to stoop to any level necessary to do it. Jai’s compulsive chain-smoking and nervous habit of flipping open his lighter are the first clues he’s playing with fire. He makes a deal with a dirty politician, Mohan Pandey (Paresh Rawal), who dresses in white and smears red paste on his forehead to convey piety—but he tellingly never removes his sunglasses. With the help of Jai’s creepy brother-in-law, Naveen (Rajat Kapoor), they manufacture a fake news story that implicates the prime minister in a terrorist attack, which Vijay airs, believing it to be true. Ratings jump, and so do Pandey’s poll numbers. But an idealistic reporter at India 24/7, Purab (Ritesh Deshmukh), suspects the story is a lie and sets out to expose the truth.
Varma’s style of filmmaking is always visually interesting—his high-contrast lighting, his unusual camera angles, his color saturation. His last film, Sarkar Raj, had a golden hue. The grayish tone of Rann is, fittingly, as cold and steely as greed, and it makes all the characters look a little corpse-like.
Vijay’s climactic monologue—and Bachchan is one of the few actors capable of making a monologue climactic—is a eulogy of sorts. It’s a speech that makes you shiver.
Rann is rated Worth Watching.
