Revisiting Ram Gopal Varma And Randeep Hooda’s ‘D’ As It Clocks 20 Years

After Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya and Company, after Mahesh Manjrekar’s Vaastav and Hansal Mehta’s Chhal, D gives us this day our daily dread… Enough about unwashed men washing their conscience in the blood of the slain. Enough of this swivel-and-snarl routine with blood-red eyes, slurring speech and smoking guns.

That reminds me… Why are the censors so worried about smoking people when they should be concerned about those blazing guns that signal urban anarchy? In places, D glamorizes violence with disdainful words and crackerjack visuals to a point where you wonder whom the script supports.

“Why do people look at us as freaks? We’re just doing our jobs like doctors and engineers,” Deshu tells his ‘gori chamri’ girlfriend. That’s how Deshu’s arch-enemy describes Deshu’s star-girlfriend Bhakti Bhatnagar.

Skin colour does seem to be an issue in the movie. Apart from the exceptionally bleached and bronzed leading lady, the entire cast comprises dark ebony skin tones… the more immoral, the darker they look.

The gangsters’ nexus with politicians and film folks is given a very filmy and hammy twist. Maybe the debutant director wanted to make gangsterism entertaining. He even gets Deshu to bully a beefy filmy hero who has been constantly harassing the heroine.

Deshu’s relationship with the smouldering smoking (oops!) siren, played by Rukhsar, harks back to Amitabh Bachchan and Parveen Babi in Deewaar.

That’s really way back for a flick that thinks Satya is a classic worthy of a homage.

If D equates darker skin tones with shades of evil, then you wonder how much cinema has actually progressed! Manish Gupta’s screenplay tries hard to create a grey zone in the gangster’s world. Initially, when our sullen protagonist Deshu is getting into crime, he meets two ganglords, one a benevolent benefactor (Goga Kapoor), the other a foul-mouthed, menacing, morally reprehensible ‘jaanwar’ who, according to the film, deserves to die.

Deshu obliges.

But the question that the point-blank slaying raises is, who draws these distinctions between ‘good’ criminals and ‘bad’ criminals and between ‘wanted’ killings and ‘unwanted’ killings? Isn’t cinema supposed to get more responsible and democratic about the way anti-social behaviour is projected?

It’s shocking to admit this. But the most gripping sequence in D is an extraordinarily violent sequence where Sushant Singh shoots Raghav (Chunky Pandey) and watches him bleed to death in painful deliberation. Before Raghav mercifully dies, his beloved wife is shot before his eyes. Chunky Pandey’s eyes dim in a haze of tears… Blood and tears… hmmmm, interesting blend.

Applause, but at what cost? It’s no coincidence that Pandey and Isha Koppikar remind you of Manoj Bajpai and Shefali Chaya in Ram Gopal Varma’s trendsetting gangster epic Satya. All through this not-unwatchable bang-bang jamboree, debutant director Vishram Sawant seems to pay homage to his mentor’s tormenting view of gang violence in Mumbai.

Mumbai never appears as a real throbbing character in D as it did in Varma’s Satya or even Bhoot. Must we blame cinematographer Srikant Naroj or the trio of eminently brusque editors Vivek Shah, Amit Parmar and Nipun Gupta for this lack of locational sustenance in the storytelling?

Or is it just that the gangster flick in Hindi has run its course? Who’s more restless, the characters, the cinematographer or the audience which feels an uneasy swell of anxious despair while watching these amoral characters play ‘Satya-Satya’ all over again?

Though the principal actors do their characters’ social and moral alienation by arresting élan, some of the supporting performances are surprisingly staccato and stylized. The actor who plays the heavyweight mediator at the end between Deshu and his doddering mentor Goga Kapoor speaks thick accented Hindi that makes him seem semesters removed from sinister.

Randeep Hooda’s much-anticipated re-launch in the title role is like that special dessert that you had been waiting for at the end of the meal. You don’t have the appetite left for another gangster hero. Still, Hooda is an actor worth watching. Though you get the feeling he’s watching himself in admiration as he performs.

It isn’t Hooda’s fault. It’s the way the wind blows. All indications are that we’ve indeed had enough of these films about aggression in the metropolitan underbelly.

Ram Gopal Varma’s unconventional cinema has now become a convention. Maybe the ever-enterprising producer could now surprise us with a film that embraces convention rather than shrugging it off with savage imperturbability.