Ram Gopal Varma-Prawal Raman’s ‘Darna Mana Hai’ Turns 22
Ram Gopal Varma thinks he can get away with anything. The problem is, he usually does. His new production Darna Mana Hai defies every norm of filmmaking in this country. It’s emphatically episodic in structure and bizarre in tone. It defines cinema in a novelistic form without losing the essential ‘cinema’ inherent in the visual experience.
A pensive man in a tuxedo emerges from a cemetery and thumbs a ride with a jovial man. “Do you believe in ghosts? You better. Because I’m one,” the man in the tuxedo shares his thoughts chattily with the amused and exasperated driver.
This eerie exchange forms part of this wackily chilling odyssey into the bowels of the bizarre. Darna Mana Hai is arguably the scariest shiver-giver to have emerged from Bollywood. From the opening shots of a bunch of carefully ill-matched youngsters driving through a thick jungle, we’re caught in a claustrophobic clasp.
Since the campfire tales unfold in segmented sections, the feeling of what-next builds up to an unbearable climax, in more ways than one. For, having built a spiral of chilling tales of macabre human caprices and unthinkable contacts with the supernatural world, the director spoils the show with a contrived and over-grisly end-game which seems more like a risible homage to Manoj Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense than a feasible finale.
Nevertheless, the director Prawaal Raman knows how to get a grip over his audience. The sextet of spine-chillers unfolds with a remarkable, unprecedented blend of humour and terror. The first story where Sohail Khan and Antara Mali drive through a deserted wilderness has the minimal impact. It loses out for being the first in the line. By the time we reach the second story, the narration carries the audience forward on its volition.
The giggly terror of the story where a hotelier (Irani) holds a guest (Saif Ali Khan) captive until he gives up smoking, a schoolteacher (Raghuvir Yadav) who goes mad thinking a past guilt has revisited him in the form of a student, or a housewife (hardly seen Revathi) who’s petrified of the apples she buys at a throwaway price, is matched by Vishal (Bhoot) Sinha’s skills behind the camera.
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By far the best tale of the dark is the one where Nana Patekar and Vivek Oberoi take a drive down a deserted highway discussing ghosts. The skills of the two actors are compounded by the director’s powerful spatial sensitivity whereby the restricted space in the automobile oozes tension without the usual gimmicky props of terror.
The film looks lush, yet real. Like all of Varma’s productions, Darna Mana Hai is shot on actual locations. Whether it’s the friends (Sameera Reddy leads the bright pack of adventurers) narrating their spooky tales to each other in the dark forest ruins, or a housewife battling her cheaply bought apples in the refrigerator, the narrative never loses its immense momentum.
Evidently, the writers Atul Sabharwal, Rajnish Thakur and Abbas Tyrewala have read the supernatural stories of Roald Dahl and Edgar Allan Poe with microscopic intensity. One suspects the six stories of Darna Mana Hai have originated from these past masters of the other-world.
Editors Amit Parmar and Nipun Gupta cut the episodes in a spiral of suspense. The audience never knows where it stands in the scream of things. This quicksand-unpredictability is both an advantage as well as a burden that the film’s avant-garde structure must bear. The audience’s inability to find a stable ground to rest their conventional responses to cinema gives Darna Mana Hai its mordant and very, very modern edge.
A lot of the film’s six-storeyed edge-of-the-seat impact hinges on the performances. Every actor from Nana Patekar to Sanjay Kapoor pitches in at just the right tone, furnishing the terror with an unerring sense of stylized fluency. Boman Irani, in the story about the pathological non-smoker, is a special delight. Seen earlier in Ram Madhvani’s Let’s Talk, Irani once again proves himself one of the best actors in the country.
It couldn’t be easy for Shilpa Shetty to act scared of apples, or for Aftab Shivdasani to play a sucker who acquires supernatural powers to teach his tormentors a lesson. Almost every actor catches on to the outlandish tenor of the stories and delivers dead-on performances.
A special mention must be made of Arun Nambiar’s sound design which takes the chilling chortles to another level altogether. Yes, mainstream Hindi cinema is changing. And not just the heroines’ costumes.
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